Boundaries of Belonging

The 1947 Partition had a major impact on issues of citizenship and

rights in India and Pakistan in the decades that followed. Boundaries of
Belonging shows how citizenship evolved at a time of political transition
and what this meant for ordinary people, by directing attention away
from South Asia’s Partition ‘hot spots’ – Bengal and the Punjab – to
Partition ‘hinterlands’ of Uttar Pradesh and Sindh. The analysis, based
on rich archival research and fieldwork, brings out commonalities,
differences and the mutual co-construction of the ‘citizen’ in both
places. It also reveals the way in which developments across the border,
such as communal violence, could directly have an impact on minority
rights in the neighbouring country. Questioning stereotypes of an
‘authoritarian’ Pakistan versus a ‘democratic’ India, Sarah Ansari and
William Gould make a major contribution to recent scholarship that
suggests the differences between India and Pakistan are overstated.

s a r a h a n s a r i is Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of

London.
w i l l i a m g o u l d is Professor of Indian History at the University
of Leeds.
Boundaries of Belonging
Localities, Citizenship and Rights in India
and Pakistan

Sarah Ansari
Royal Holloway, University of London

William Gould
University of Leeds
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Title: Boundaries of belonging : localities, citizenship and rights in India and
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They had left their cities but they carried their cities with them, as a trust, on
their shoulders. That’s how it usually is. Even when cities are left behind,
they don’t stay behind. They seize on you even more. Intizar Hussain, Basti
(1979), chapter 5

We are surrounded by places. We walk over and through them. We

live in places, relate to others in them, die in them. Nothing we do is
unplaced. How could it be otherwise? Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place:
A Philosophical History (1997), p. ix
 Contents

List of Figures page ix

Acknowledgements x
List of Abbreviations xii
Maps xiv

Introduction 1
1 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan 23
Personifying the Postcolonial State 26
Projecting the New State 42
Conclusion 64

2 People on the Move: Refugees and Minorities in Uttar Pradesh

and Sindh 67
Refugee Rehabilitation and the Predicament of Minorities 71
Representing Refugees/Demonizing Minorities 86
Marking Evacuees: Property and Its Control between India and Pakistan 92
Conclusion 101

3 Citizens and the City: From People on the Move to the

Movement of Goods 103
Politics of Price Controls and Rationing 106
Corruption and Anti-corruption 122
Conclusion 133

4 New Constitutions, New Citizens 135

‘New Constitutions’ 138
‘New Citizens’ 156
Conclusion 178

5 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in Postcolonial

South Asia 181
Colonial Developments 182
Post-1947 India 191
Post-1947 Pakistan 202
Conclusion 220

vii
viii Contents

6 ‘Hidden Citizens’ in 1940s and 1950s India and Pakistan 223

Religious Minorities in Sindh and UP 224
Dalit, Tribal and Hari Rights 239
Conclusion 257

Epilogue and Conclusion 259

Glossary 289
Bibliography 293
Index 308
 Figures

1.1 Indian leaders carry the ashes of Mohandas K. Gandhi,

Allahabad, 19 February 1948 page 29
1.2 People watching Mohandas K. Gandhi’s funeral, Delhi,
31 January 1948 31
1.3 A view of M. A. Jinnah’s funeral, Karachi,
12 September 1948 36
1.4 Muslim League National Guards with the Pakistani flag,
Karachi, December 1947 45
1.5 A five-rupee currency note presented to M. A. Jinnah by the
Ministry of Finance, 1 April 1948. Issued by the Reserve
Bank of India, the note, stamped with Government of Pakistan
(Hukumat-i Pakistan), operated as legal tender in the new state 46
1.6 Govind Ballabh Pant, first premier/chief minister of UP 48
3.1 Non-Muslim refugees leaving Karachi by sea,
December 1947 104
3.2 Cartoon capturing the austerity policies of the Pakistan
authorities in the early 1950s. Placard slogan reads
‘AUSTERITY PARADE’, while the sash on the marcher
taking the salute reads: ‘THE PAKISTANI CONSUMERS’,
Dawn (Karachi), 14 August 1952 111
3.3 Rationing notice (Dawn, Karachi), 1949 112
4.1 Indian leaders in the Constituent Assembly, Council
House Library, New Delhi, 1947 139
4.2 Parliamentary elections, Delhi, January 1952 158
4.3 A queue of voters, India, January 1952 158
4.4 Local elections, Pakistan, December 1959 166
5.1 Meeting of the All-India Women’s Conference,
December 1947 194
5.2 Fatima Jinnah (C-back row, silver-haired, clad in white),
sister of M. A. Jinnah, surrounded by women making
clothes for refugees, Governor House, Karachi,
December 1947 203
ix
 Acknowledgements

Writing a co-authored monograph that is not a chapter-by-chapter sep-

aration of India and Pakistan, but rather one which seeks to tie each state/
place to the other throughout requires a particular kind of understanding
between the authors. We feel that this book could not have been possible
without a sense of mutual cooperation, assisted by the (sometimes exces-
sively) easy-going nature of each writer. More importantly, it was also
made possible by our long-term collaborations with a range of supporters
and colleagues, and to them we extend our grateful collaborative thanks.
At an institutional level, the School of History, University of Leeds, and
the History Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, have
provided phases of research leave which have allowed us to finish off much
of the research and writing required for this book. But, more broadly, the
conceptual challenges of simultaneously writing about both places were
only sustained in the long term by a large-scale research project grant
provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) between
2007 and 2010. Boundaries of Belonging is the ultimate long-term outcome
of that project, entitled ‘From Subjects to Citizens: Society and the Every-
day State in India and Pakistan’, which has spawned a whole range of other
collaborations, networks and projects that have occupied us since then.
Much of the research material in this book was the product of long-term
archival research stretching back over a decade and covering a number of
different cities. We would like to thank the Nehru Memorial Museum and
Library, New Delhi; the National Archives, New Delhi; the Uttar Pradesh
State Archives, Lucknow; the Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai; the
Sindh Archives, Karachi; the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs,
Karachi; the Institute of Sindhology, Jamshoro; the National Archives of
Pakistan, Islamabad; the US National Archives at College Park, Maryland;
the Asia Pacific Room of the British Library, London, which houses the
India Office collections; the Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge;
the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds; and the Emily Wilding
Davison Library at Royal Holloway. We are also grateful for a small grant
from the late Miss Isobel Thornley’s Bequest to the University of London,
which covered the cost of certain images included in our book.

x
 Acknowledgements xi

Over the course of our joint enterprise, we have also depended upon
the advice, support and friendship of a wide range of colleagues, mostly
fellow historians but not only those limited to that discipline. For their
assistance and advice on materials relating to our two chosen ‘case
studies’ and also for listening to early drafts of chapters as presentations,
we thank (in strict alphabetical order!) Sana Aiyar, Edward Anderson,
Crispin Bates, Anjali Bhardwaj-Datta, Paul Brass, Stuart Carroll, Joya
Chatterji, Cathy Coombs, Markus Daechsel, Santosh Dass, Antara
Datta, Ayona Datta, Rohit De, Faizal Devji, Sarah Gandee, Jesus
Garza-Chairez, Anindita Ghosh, Oliver Godsmark, Kevin Greenbank,
Dan Haines, Tariq Jazeel, Justin Jones, Yasmin Khan, Elizabeth Leake,
Stephen Legg, Eleanor Newbigin, Rosalind O’Hanlon, Steven Pierce, Ali
Usman Qasmi, Pallavi Raghovan, Francis Robinson, Jonathan Saha, Uditi
Sen, Farzana Shaikh, Ornit Shani, Taylor Sherman, Tom Simpson, Gur-
harpal Singh, Ian Talbot, Shabnum Tejani, Layli Uddin, Pippa Virdee,
David Washbrook, Phil Withington, Andrew Wyatt, Vazira Zamindar and
the organizers of the British Association of South Asian Studies in Cam-
bridge, April 2016. For assistance in India, we would especially like to
thank Ekta Gautam, Dakxin Chhara, Sunil Sonwane, Sandeep Pandey,
Mudit Shukla, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Ram Advani, Patrick French and
Shakti Sinha. Across the border in Pakistan, the same debt of gratitude
goes to Sana Ansari, Aabida Ali, Lata Parwani, Nausheen Ahmad and
Rafiq Safi Munshey, Babar Ayaz and Samia Khan, Masuma Hasan,
Karamat Ali, Ghulam Muhammad Lakho and Gul Muhammad Umrani.
Throughout, a range of professional and personal friendships have
similarly helped to keep our joint enterprise afloat. For their good
humour, intellectual debate around the book’s themes and general
encouragement, colleagues at Leeds and Royal Holloway not already
mentioned would include Nir Arieli, Simon Ball, Manuel Barcia,
Malcolm Chase, Kate Dossett, Shane Doyle, Simon Hall, James Harris,
Will Jackson, Laura King, Graham Loud, Andrew Lunt, Andrea Major,
and Michelle Ridge (at Leeds) and Evrim Binbas, Jason Brock, Justin
Champion, Chi-Kwan Mark, Stella Moss, Penelope Mullens and Weipin
Tsai, together with the many visiting academics from Pakistan who have
spent time at Royal Holloway over recent years. Closer to home, a
number of important friends and family members have provided moral
support and/or feedback on the book, including Olivia Gould, Richard
and Elizabeth Gould, Radu and Elena Harasemiuc, Alexandru
Harasemiuc, Liz Gilston, Tariq Sadiq, Rajesh Jha, Irna Qureshi, Steve
and Esther Cooper, Humayun, Akbar and Zafar, Rowan and Charlotte,
Nasreen and Nayyar, Zufah and Zulkarnain, along with the rest of the
extended Ansari-Girling-Machover-Waweru ‘clan’.
 Abbreviations

AICC All-India Congress Committee, India

AIWC All-India Women’s Conference
APWA All-Pakistan Women’s Association
BC Backward Classes
BL British Library
DSO District Supply Officer
FCO Foreign and Commonwealth Office
GAD General Administration Department
GCW Gandhi’s Collected Works
IAS Indian Administrative Service
IOR India Office Records, British Library, London
IPS Indian Police Service
MEA Ministry of External Affairs, India
MHA Ministry of Home Affairs, India
NAI National Archives of India, New Delhi
NDC Ministry of Interior, Pakistan, Home Division National
Documentation Centre
NMML Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi
NWFP North-West Frontier Province
PHWA Pakistan Hindu Welfare Association
PILER Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research
PPP Pakistan People’s Party
PRODA Public and Representatives Offices (Disqualification) Act
PSPE Pakistan Special Police Establishment
PWD Public Works Department
PWNG Pakistan Women’s National Guard
PWNR Pakistan Women’s Naval Reserve
PWVS Pakistan Women’s Volunteer Service
RSS Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
SC Scheduled Caste
SCBA Supreme Court Bar Association
SCF Scheduled Castes Federation
SLRM Sindh Land Reform Movement
SPE Special Police Establishment (India)

xii
 List of Abbreviations xiii

ST Scheduled Tribe
SWJN Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru
TRO Town Rationing Officer
UKHC United Kingdom High Commission, Pakistan
UKNA United Kingdom National Archives, Kew, London
UNO United Nations Organization
UP Uttar Pradesh (formerly the United Provinces)
UPSA Uttar Pradesh State Archives, Lucknow
USNA United States National Archives
VJSS Vimukt Jati Sevak Sangh
WAF Women’s Action Forum
WIA Women’s Indian Association
WPB Women’s Protection Bill
 Maps

Map 1 Map of India and Pakistan

xiv
Maps xv

Map 2 Map of Uttar Pradesh (formerly the United Provinces)

xvi Maps

N Baluchistan
Punjab
Upper Sindh Bahawa lpur
Frontier
St a t e

Sukkur
Larkana

INDIA
Khairpur State
Indu

Nawabshah
s R
iv
er

Dadu

Thar Parkar

Hyderabad
Karachi
FCT Thatta

INDIA
Arabian Sea
© S.Ballard (2019)

Map 3 Map of Sindh

 Introduction

In March 1948, Mridula Sarabhai sent a report from Anandpur Sahib,

Punjab, to India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rameshwari
Nehru and Lady Mountbatten. Sarabhai discussed how a group of Sikh
women ‘recovered’ following abduction during Hindu-Sikh-Muslim
violence had been transferred into the care of the Pakistan military.
Sarabhai, the daughter of a powerful industrialist family of Gujarat and
a key figure in the women’s movement in India, had been tasked by the
new Government of India to lead recovery operations for women
abducted over the border during Partition violence. On three occasions,
Sarabhai learned, this particular group of women had been ‘handed back’
to their ‘abductors’. This practice, she claimed, was going on in more
than one place in the border areas, and it was also suggested that the
Pakistan military were ‘making money through this scheme’.1
Partition – that is the division of British India into the separate states of
India and Pakistan on 14/15 August 1947 – involved the massive transfer
of people with perhaps as many as fourteen to sixteen million refugees
eventually moving in opposite directions across the new border that was
drawn up in the weeks leading up to Independence. The uncertainties, as
illustrated by Sarabhai’s report, bound up in what was the twentieth
century’s most significant exchange of populations (or alternatively
forced migration) cannot, however, be easily explained as a simple nar-
rative of victimhood. In the case of abducted women, many resisted the
assumptions of the recovery operation based on its effect on their per-
sonal circumstances, with a number of first-hand accounts describing
how women themselves refused to be ‘saved’, or to comply with the
patriarchal assumptions of this particular population exchange.2 Their

1
‘Note on the visit to Anandpur Mela’ 24/3/48 – to Jawaharlal Nehru, K. C. Neogy and
Lady Mountbatten, Papers of Mridula Sarabhai, Reel 1, Nehru Memorial Museum and
Library (hereafter NMML).
2
This is explored in a number of case studies in Kamla Bhasin and Ritu Menon, Borders
and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998), and

1
2 Introduction

agency meant that in some notable instances women identified as

‘abductees’ evaded recovery. On 1 March 1948, to give one example,
Sushila Nayar and Gurbachan Singh acting as social workers reported to
Nehru from Patiala that around 175 Muslim women had shown reluc-
tance to leave their new homes or to be moved on from camps back to
their original families.3 Reportedly, around a quarter of these women
directly resisted ‘rescue’ by running away from the recovery camp in
which they had been housed.4
The often-forcible removal of people across newly drawn national
boundaries highlights important dichotomies in the meaning of political
independence in South Asia. On the one hand, there certainly existed a
sense of powerlessness among many people who were directly subject to
the vicissitudes of Partition. After all, the women of Anandpur Sahib and
other places on both sides of the new border were ‘recovered’, whether
they liked it or not, by the state authorities, both Indian and Pakistani,
and so in many respects their individual freedom was denied. In the
uncertain months and years that straddled British India’s division, it was
unclear how the supposed agents of each state were expected to act, and
where the limits of their responsibilities for recovering citizens lay. But
the predicament of abducted women did not represent a simple contra-
diction between powerlessness and agency. In practice, there was little
consensus as to how the emerging rights of each state’s new citizenry
would be formed or framed in this period of significant political transi-
tion. The fate of India and Pakistan’s recently created citizens was often
determined either by high-level processes of intergovernmental negoti-
ation or more precariously by the frequently arbitrary decisions made by
local administrations, police officers and other government servants.
Meanwhile, there were opportunities thrown up by this uncertainty –
chances for individuals to shape and exercise their rights in new ways,
and to take advantage of the ambiguities created by Partition and its
accompanying movement of peoples on an enormous scale.
The idea of the citizen in both India and Pakistan was put together
hurriedly and subject to change, not least because the geopolitical shape
of postcolonial South Asia itself was decided in a matter of weeks. As late
as March 1947, there was no absolute certainty that Partition should or
would result from the decolonization of British India. Within the

similarly in Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India
(London: C. Hurst and Co., 2000), particularly chapter 4 ‘Women’.
3
Jawaharlal Nehru to Sushila Nayar, 2 March 1948, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru
(hereafter SWJN), Vol. 5, p. 118.
4
Jawaharlal Nehru to K. C. Neogy, 3 March 1948, SWJN, Vol. 5, p. 120.
 Introduction 3

gradually forming imagining of ‘India’ and ‘Pakistan’ that emerged out of

discussions during and after the Second World War, there was always
scope for alternative scenarios. In the fraught negotiations leading up to
the transfer of power, and especially during the Cabinet Mission in the
spring and summer of 1946, the separation of India and Pakistan was not
regarded as inevitable. In fact, it is now well established that the ‘father’
of Pakistan – Muhammad Ali Jinnah – would have welcomed a solution
short of absolute division, and that the Congress under Nehru accepted
the prospect of Partition from March 1947, at least at the central level, as
a lesser of many evils, and a means of preserving Congress’s political
authority.5 The constitutional frameworks of postcolonial South Asia
were also in large part the legacy of the same structure of colonial
governance and so retained much that was similar after 1947: the
provisions of the 1935 Government of India Act that had envisaged
a federal system within a greater India eventually formed the basis
of India’s 1950 Constitution, and it similarly underpinned much of
Pakistan’s 1956 Constitution. But in the decades since Independence,
India and Pakistan have come to be seen as very different places. Their
subsequent evolution has taken them in apparently diverging political
directions, with India often held up as a postcolonial ‘success story’ in
contrast to Pakistan’s reputation as a failing, if not failed, state. This
oversimplification of their post-1947 histories has emphasized difference
at the expense of recognizing commonalities at work across the region.
This book is about how in the mutually interconnected social and polit-
ical histories of these two new states we can find the messy realities of
citizenship in each place. This is a history that includes the highest
decisions of states as well as the politics of the streets, but it is a narrative
that can only be complete if told in both places at once.

The historian of Germany Celia Applegate, in her exploration of regional

histories in a European context, has argued persuasively for the need to
‘regard the specificity of places as the outcome of social and cultural
processes interacting with physical environments’.6 Likewise, for sociolo-
gist Alan Warde, ‘places are not automatic contexts for collective life but
[are] created’, and so can be regarded as ‘resources to be manipulated in
the creation, recreation and restructuring of the contexts in which people

5
See Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for
Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
6
Celia Applegate, ‘A Europe of Regions: Reflections on the Historiography of Sub-
National Places in Modern Times’, American Historical Review 104, 4 (1999), p. 1181.
4 Introduction

are made – or make themselves’.7 Ignoring the spatial turn of the last
couple of decades is no longer a realistic option for historians: to quote
Doreen Massey, ‘places’ represent networks of complex associations that
‘have over time been constructed, laid down, interacted with one
another, decayed, and renewed. Some of these relations will be, as it
were, contained within the place; others will stretch beyond it, tying any
particular locale into wider relationships and processes in which other
places are implicated too’.8 Moreover, because people ‘move and stop,
settle, and move again … places are shifting and changing, always
becoming through people’s engagements – material as well as discursive –
in, through and with them’. ‘Place’, therefore, ‘is not where social rela-
tions simply take place, but an inherent ingredient of their modalities of
actualization’.9 In other words, rather than opposed to or disruptive of
‘place’, mobility – or movement – is an inherent part of how spaces are
defined and operate,10 and therefore central to the processes by which
citizenship is also, imagined, constructed or contested.
Boundaries of Belonging responds to these conceptual insights regarding
the significance of ‘place’ by centring its exploration of the impact of
Independence on citizenship and rights in two specific localities – one
Uttar Pradesh (UP), an Indian state after 1947, and the other Sindh, a
province in Pakistan. Both were parts of British India that were less
associated with the immediate upheavals of Partition as compared with
the Punjab and Bengal, but which came to be hugely affected by its
longer term consequences for Indian and Pakistani lives. Accordingly
we use UP and Sindh – the focal points of our individual interests as
historians of South Asia – as the common lens through which to investi-
gate what ‘belonging’ came to mean more broadly in the recalibrated
circumstances of the 1940s and 1950s. Crucially, our concentration on
UP and Sindh allows us to explore the fallout from Independence and
Partition from the perspective of two places that, on the one hand, were
not physically divided, and, on the other, where the shifting status of
local minority communities (which had become significant before 1947)
proved to be critical to ideas about ‘India’ and ‘Pakistan’ moving
forward.

7
Alan Warde, ‘Recipes for a Pudding: A Comment on Locality’ Antipode 21 (1989),
pp. 274–81.
8
Doreen Massey, ‘A Global Sense of Place’, in Space, Place and Gender, ed. Doreen
Massey (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 120.
9
Kostas Retsikas, ‘Being and Place: Movement, Ancestors, and Personhood in East Java,
Indonesia’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (2007), pp. 971–2.
10
Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
 Introduction 5

UP and Sindh – the former occupying much of the Ganges basin in

north India, the latter straddling the Indus River further to the west –
may appear on first inspection to have been separated during the colonial
period by more than simply geographical distance. In particular, UP’s
location at the political heart of British India, for instance, contrasted
markedly with Sindh’s relatively peripheral position under the Raj. But
by the early twentieth century both places could boast key centres of
imperial activity. In 1911, accompanied by great pomp and ceremony,
the political capital of British India transferred from Calcutta to New
Delhi, on the border of UP, and the province had become a political
thermometer for much of the rest of the country with its vast population,
key party political figures and important cities. Karachi’s rapid expansion
meant that that by the First World War it was exporting more wheat than
any other port in Britain’s global empire and hence challenging Calcutta
and Bombay for business.11 There were also clear, if not necessarily
acknowledged, parallels in terms of the communal patterns that existed
in the two provinces. Both possessed influential minority communities,
whose horizons (not simply political) had for a long time extended
beyond the borders of their provinces.12 Moreover, by the time of the
Second World War, UP arguably represented a microcosm of India as a
whole: the proportion of Muslims to the total population in UP, com-
bined with pockets of (urban) dominance, more or less mirrored the
overall situation in India. But Paul Brass’s statement that UP Muslims
(15 per cent of the population according to the 1931 Census) during the
late colonial period ‘constituted a cultural and administrative elite’ with
higher rates of change ‘in several respects, including urbanization, liter-
acy and government employment’, could equally have been applied to
Sindhi Hindus (c. 25 per cent), albeit with the addition of ‘commercial’
to their description.13 With the rise of competing nationalist organiza-
tions over the course of the early twentieth century, and the emergence of
religion as a source of conflict, these local communal realities endowed
political developments taking place in both UP and Sindh with broader
significance.

11
Sarah Ansari, ‘At the Crossroads? Exploring Sindh’s Recent Past from a Spatial
Perspective’, Contemporary South Asia 23, 1 (2015), pp. 7–25.
12
For more information on the trading activities of Sindhi Hindus that took them far from
the province, see Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants 1750–1947:
Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000); and Mark-Anthony Falzon, Cosmopolitan Connections: The Sindhi Diaspora,
1860–2000 (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
13
Paul R. Brass, ‘Muslim Separatism in United Provinces: Social Context and Political
Strategy before Partition’, Economic and Political Weekly 5, 3/5 (January 1970),
pp. 167, 169.
6 Introduction

By the interwar period, UP’s leading role in all-India politics had

become well-established.14 The province was now home to key move-
ments that spanned the nationalist spectrum, including the Indian
National Congress (the Nehru family famously had its base there),
Hindu nationalism (the re-organized Hindu Mahasabha in Banaras in
1923 was headed by the Allahabad politician, Madan Mohan Malaviya)
and Muslim political leadership (closely associated with Muslims living
in the small towns or qasbahs of the province). UP spanned the ‘Hindi’
heartland of India, and its educational institutions, periodical publica-
tions and intellectual life were central to the crucial language debates of
the late colonial period. It was in UP where early support for the Muslim
League emerged in towns such as Aligarh, and it was UP Muslims who
helped to drive the eventual claim of League politicians to speak for
Muslims at an all-India level.15 Another decisive development with far-
reaching all-India significance were the knock-on political consequences
generated by the decision of UP Congress politicians not to form a
coalition with Muslim Leaguers there following the provincial elections
of 1937. This move directly helped to set the scene for the increasingly
separatist strategies of the latter at the all-India level.16
Meanwhile, as an outpost of Bombay Presidency, an increasing
number of Sindhi Muslims during the early twentieth century grew more
politically aware of their minority status within what they regarded as a
Hindu-dominated administrative and political unit.17 These concerns
prompted discussion at the Round Table Conferences held in London
in the early 1930s about whether Sindh should be removed from Bombay

14
Gyanesh Kudaisya, Region, Nation, “Heartland”: Uttar Pradesh in India’s Body Politic
(New Delhi: Sage, 2006).
15
Francis Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces’
Muslims, 1860–1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). For a more recent
(revisionist) exploration of separatist politics in the UP during this period, see Venkat
Dhulipala, ‘Rallying the Qaum: The Muslim League in the UP, 1937–1938’, Modern
Asian Studies 44, 3 (2010), pp. 603–40, in which he tests out the arguments and evidence
that drive his Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late
Colonial North India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Another re-
interpretation of the motives involved in Muslim separatist politics is provided in
Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2013).
16
Deepak Pandey, ‘Congress-Muslim League Relations 1937–39: The Parting of the
Ways’, Modern Asian Studies 12, 4 (1978), pp. 629–54.
17
For instance, see the case presented in M. A. Khuhro, ‘A Story of the Suffering of Sind’
(1930), in Documents on Separation of Sind from the Bombay Presidency, ed. with an
introduction by Hamida Khuhro (Islamabad: Islamabad Islamic University, 1982),
pp. 196–254. See also Sarah Ansari, ‘Identity Politics and Nation-Building in
Pakistan: The Case of Sindhi Nationalism’, in State and Nation-Building in Pakistan:
Beyond Islam and Security, eds. Roger D. Long, Yunus Samad, Gurharpal Singh and Ian
Talbot (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 285–310.
 Introduction 7

Presidency and turned into a separate province (which duly took place in
1936 in the wake of the 1935 Government of India Act). Supporters of
Sindh’s separation from Bombay deployed arguments that hinged (at
least in part) on the ‘logic’ of its possessing a local Muslim majority,
rehearsing (and perhaps contributing to) the League’s later claims
regarding Muslim-majority provinces en masse from 1940 onwards.
Moreover, as Sindhis today still remind other Pakistanis, the first official
resolution demanding the creation of ‘Pakistan’ was the one passed by
the Sindh provincial assembly on 3 March 1943, its mover – G. M. Sayed
(ironic in view of his later espousal of Sindhi nationalism) – arguing that
Muslims in India were ‘justly entitled to the right as a single separate
nation to have independent national states of their own, carved in the
zones in which they are in majority in the subcontinent of India’.18 By
1947 – thanks to developments such as these – majority and minority
communities in UP and Sindh alike had become increasingly sensitized
both about their local position and in relation to the need (from their
perspective) to protect their interests as the broader South Asian political
landscape changed.
After Independence, UP and Sindh continued to play significant but
different roles in the life of the new states of India and Pakistan. UP – as
India’s new ‘Hindi heartland’ and with the largest number of seats of any
state in the Constituent Assembly, and later in the Lok Sabha – remained
strategically placed at the hub of all-India politics and proximate to New
Delhi as federal capital of the Indian Union. Its population, which was
over 60 million according to the 1951 Census making UP by far and
away India’s biggest new state, endowed it with colossal political clout in
relation to the nation-building politics of the late 1940s and 1950s.19
Sindh, with the federal capital on its doorstep (Karachi was officially
detached from the province in 1948 and turned into a federal territory),
was also located in close proximity to the centre of power in Pakistan,
though in practice many Sindhis felt that their province remained mar-
ginalized in political terms. From a population perspective, with only
circa six million inhabitants in 1951, Sindh lagged considerably behind
both East Bengal (42 million) and the Punjab (22.5 million). Like
Bengalis, however, many Sindhis railed against what they regarded as
the unfair dominance of Punjabis and muhajirs (Urdu-speaking migrants

18
Proceedings of the Sind Legislative Assembly, Official Report, Vol. XVII, no. 6, Wednesday,
3 March 1943 (Karachi, 1943), p. 2, www.pas.gov.pk/uploads/downloads/Pakistan%
20Resolution%20moved%20by%20G%20M%20Sayeed.pdf (accessed December 2018).
19
Gyanesh Kudaisya, A Republic in the Making: India in the 1950s (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2017).
8 Introduction

from India) within key institutions of the state such as the bureaucracy
and the military, and for them, again like Bengalis, language became a
particular bone of contention. With the introduction of the One Unit
scheme in 1955, which merged the existing provinces in West Pakistan as
a counterbalance to East Pakistan’s numerical majority, the province’s
sidelining was further compounded, as was a growing sense of injustice
among more nationalistically inclined Sindhis.20 But these similarities
and distinctions aside, what UP and Sindh most certainly did have in
common after 1947 was the continuing presence of relatively sizeable
religious minorities as well as considerable ongoing refugee traffic.
Alongside members of minority communities who chose not to leave,
UP became the destination of choice for large numbers of Sindhi
Hindus, while Sindh (including Karachi) absorbed even greater
quantities of migrants from UP. Sindh and UP, thus, found their own
relationship transformed, thanks to these post–Partition demographic
realities. As Vazira Zamindar has highlighted in her analysis of the
content of contemporary cartoons in Karachi’s Urdu-language press,
refugees from UP who had taken refuge in cities in Sindh followed
developments in their former home very closely from across the
border.21

As one of the first multi-sited studies of its kind, Boundaries of Belonging

also follows what Frederick Cooper has described for French Africa as a
‘federal moment’. In it we explore postcolonial developments in the
context of a possible larger set of processes related to South Asia’s
postcolonial history that are not based on ‘automatic’ assumptions of
absolute separation after 1947.22 As a consequence, our book deliber-
ately refrains from revisiting developments in those former provinces of
British India most usually associated with the traumatic end of empire in
South Asia. Existing work on the main ‘boundary’ regions of the Punjab
and Bengal, and later Kashmir, which were most obviously affected by
Partition violence, have generated a picture of Independence as a

20
Ansari, ‘Identity Politics and Nation-Building in Pakistan’; Tariq Rahman, ‘Language
and Politics in a Pakistan Province: The Sindhi Language Movement’, Asian Survey 35,
11 (November 1995), pp. 1005–16; Suranjan Das, Kashmir and Sindh: Nation-Building,
Ethnicity and Regional Politics in South Asia (London: Anthem, 2004); and for a more
general study that includes discussion of developments in Sindh, see Adeel Khan, Politics
of Identity: Ethnic Nationalism and the State in Pakistan (London: Sage, 2004).
21
Vazira Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees,
Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 63, 87, 93.
22
Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French
Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
 Introduction 9

moment of crisis, rehabilitation and border making. However, as we

argue, some of the important ‘hinterlands’ of Partition were also affected
by the impact of territorial division and population transfer, if less prox-
imately, and so provide an effective context for examining broader
meanings of Independence for Indian and Pakistani citizens. Moreover,
the fact that UP and Sindh – entangled as they came to be with each
another – cannot provide answers to every question about what being an
Indian or Pakistani citizen meant during this period reinforces the neces-
sity of looking beyond Partition’s immediate ‘hot spots’ when assessing
its longer-term consequences. UP – the key point of origin for Muslim
migration to Pakistan in the years under scrutiny here – and similarly
Sindh – the point of origin for many Pakistani Hindus who migrated to
India from early 1948 onwards – may not have been physically cut in two
as happened in the Punjab and Bengal, but these two particular places
came to be intimately connected thanks to the pattern of migration flows
between them that dragged on well into the 1950s. Both were also
located in close proximity to where central state power was exercised,
the federal capitals of Delhi and Karachi.
This approach also allows us to draw attention to how the ‘state’ in its
different spatial guises operated on both sides of the new border, as well
as what being a ‘citizen’ could signify for ordinary Indians and Pakistanis
during a period of continuing flux and uncertainty. We explore how ideas
and forms of citizenship in India and Pakistan were created by contingent
processes of interaction between ‘state’ – its representatives and insti-
tutions – and ‘society’ – its citizens-in-the-making – in the decade after
1947. Boundaries of Belonging, therefore, is not principally concerned with
the powerlessness of India and Pakistan’s populations in the face of
bureaucratic and police violence, but more with the ways that new or
revised forms of citizenship and ideas about the rights of the citizen were
articulated despite, or sometimes because of, violence and displacement.
India and Pakistan today possess some of the world’s most vibrant and
diverse citizens’ rights movements, which have emerged since the rise of
political populism across the subcontinent in the 1970s. But many of
their key themes and campaigns – work conditions, the cost of living,
corruption, tribal and peasant rights – have deeper historical roots that
relate directly to earlier moments in the definition of citizen rights in
different parts of South Asia. At the same time, very often, these forms
of activism have been obscured by larger, better-known or more access-
ible state-centred citizenship discourses. Such hierarchies are addressed
by our exploration of the messy citizenship contexts of Partition, charac-
terized by the struggles of relatively marginal communities to assert
their rights.
10 Introduction

This book accordingly sets out to move past explorations of ‘formal’

notions of the citizen that approach rights as something only ‘transmit-
ted’ by law and constitutions.23 Instead, it deliberately engages with
everyday meanings of both citizenship and citizenship rights as these
crystallized and – crucially – were contested in the two neighbouring
countries. As well as narrating the apparent ‘conferring’ of rights
from above, it explores ways in which ideas about rights were publicly
circulated and how far these had an effect on early forms of legal activ-
ism. The creation and evolution of formal state-centred citizenship, and
the particular entitlements and responsibilities that this status embodied,
often stood in sharp contrast to vernacular ideas about citizen rights.
The complicated link between these two levels of citizenship politics,
we contend, sheds valuable light on tensions between belonging and
exclusion, which we regard as the unfinished business of earlier nation-
alist struggles.
As part of our examination of the contested nature of citizenship in
postcolonial South Asia, Boundaries of Belonging draws attention to the
struggles for more inclusive citizenship that took place in both states, as
marginalized groups to varying degrees excluded from ‘citizenship in
practice’ sought to secure rights that they believed were due to them
after 1947. That their demands for entitlements were often articulated in
the vernacular – whether that of language, religion, caste, ethnicity or
tribe – is significant for understanding what citizenship meant for ordin-
ary people. The vocabulary of gender also entered the contemporary
political equation as women similarly questioned – and challenged – what
citizenship had really brought for them. Alongside formal efforts to
establish notions of citizenship that squared with state-formulated prior-
ities, ‘hidden citizens’ in both states appropriated the language of entitle-
ment and rights to challenge asymmetries of power and exclusion that
operated on both sides of the border.

None of these movements for rights in the late 1940s and 1950s made
sense without some kind of reference to the idea of the state. In his
famous 1991 article, Timothy Mitchell proposed that the idea of a
boundary between state and society is simply an ‘effect’, namely an idea
bound up with techniques of any particular political order.24 Mitchell

23
Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Zamindar, The Long Partition.
24
Timothy Mitchell, ‘The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their
Critics’, American Political Science Review 85, 1 (March 1991), pp. 77–96.
 Introduction 11

himself built on Philip Abrams’s insight that the ‘ideological’ qualities of

the state needed to be taken seriously in themselves.25 These approaches
to the state have a particular resonance for South Asia, and have been
fruitfully explored by anthropologists for the contemporary period,26
but as yet somewhat less so for the phase of transition to political inde-
pendence itself. Without doubt, such treatments of the state (because
they integrate social understandings of a state effect) need to be carefully
historicized, taking account of how the state has been ‘imagined’ and
debated at different levels of intensity over time and space. More recently
David Gellner, when discussing life in South Asia’s contentious northern
borderlands, has drawn attention to the suggestion made by Abrams that
students of the modern state should ‘dispense entirely with “the state” as
a category of analysis’, but equally he cautions against wholeheartedly
following this advice on the grounds that:
Today ethnographers everywhere are increasingly forced to think about the state
because it intrudes, far more forcibly than it did seventy years ago, on the lives of
the people they study … People themselves are no longer content to view the state
as a necessary evil. Increasingly they make demands of it and expect it to act
positively to improve their lives. In the study of South Asia this has led to what
might appear, at first glance, to be two contrasting trends: on the one hand, the
study of the ‘everyday state’, how people actually interact with the state and what
they expect from it … and, on the other, following Abram’s call, studies of the
idea of the state, the ‘state effect’ as it has been called … In fact, of course, the two
kinds of study necessarily overlap ….27

In Boundaries of Belonging, we make the case for a historicized view of

these same processes, in particular that the state mattered for most
Indians and Pakistanis over the late 1940 and early 1950s, and their views
on it were directly conditioned by the ‘aftershocks’ of decolonization
itself. This unstable situation generated for many contemporaries a very
specific historical sensibility: a notion of thinking both backwards and
forwards in time, on the one hand involving reflection on past forms
of colonial state control or repression, and, on the other, a series of
forward-looking expectations linked to ideas of political freedom and

25
Philip Abrams, ‘Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State (1977)’, Journal of
Historical Sociology 1, 1 (1988), pp. 58–89.
26
See, most notably, Stuart Corbridge et al. (eds.), Seeing the State: Governance and
Governmentality in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); C. J. Fuller
and Veronique Benei (eds.), The Everyday State and Society in Modern India (London:
C. Hurst & Co., 2001); Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat (eds.), States of
Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2001).
27
David W. Gellner (ed.), Borderland Lives in Northern South Asia (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2013), pp. 2–3.
12 Introduction

responsibility. For this reason, the idea of the state, while being about
local experience and contact, was also about imagining something in the
process of realization, with an emphasis on achievement or failure. These
perceptions were also informed by a sense of emergence from crisis.
Concentrating on the immediate impact and fallout of 1947 itself means
also concentrating on those whose recovery as citizens was also part of a
political order: refugees, the displaced, the aforementioned abducted
women and children who were theoretically separated from a state that
acted upon them – a state that was presented as an autonomous set of
institutions. But this sense of autonomy, it could be argued, was always a
fiction that was itself created out of the conditions of the late 1940s.
The state in early post-Independence India and Pakistan therefore
was not a uniform entity despite often being represented as such. Rather,
it was a complex arrangement that worked through informal agents and
appeared in different guises to different constituencies. Networks of
formal and informal power, alongside neighbourhood and class struc-
tures, interacted with the state’s various institutional levels and affected
its appearance and its actions.28 It was subject to conflicts between often
competing social interests, which meant that its sway could be similarly
unstable and unpredictable. The secrecy, for instance, surrounding the
activities of state agents in contemporary India and Pakistan (such as the
use of police informants) was established as a means of upholding the
‘fiction’ of a homogenous state that was presumed to act according to
rules and principles, but which was ultimately arbitrary.29 The division
between what was explicit and what was hidden in this way developed out
of a historically and spatially conditional set of variables in the exercise of
power over the long-term transition to Independence.
Put another way, the very circumstances of Independence brought
about certain forms of everyday state practices in the context of ‘new’
ideas about the public sphere and freedom, which together created a gulf
between ideological state effect and its quotidian practices. Because
this process evolved within a context of new ideas about rights, such
rights were always imagined in relation to changing notions of space,
across both conceptual and actual internal/external borders. The notion
of an individual’s citizenship rights in relation to the idea of the state,

28
Fuller and Benei’s The Everyday State sheds important light on the ways in which the
large, amorphous and impersonal Indian State affected the everyday lives of its citizens,
arguing that state and society merge in the daily lives of most, with the boundary between
the two blurred and negotiable according to social context and position.
29
Anastasia Piliavsky, ‘A Secret in the Oxford Sense: Thieves and the Rhetoric of
Mystification in Western India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 53, 2 (April
2011), pp. 290–313.
 Introduction 13

it could be argued, only made sense in a relative way to what they were/
had been/might be in a different jurisdictional space. What the state
meant and how the rights of the citizen changed was shaped by the
relational spaces of India and Pakistan, and epitomized by the close
connections or movement between such regions as UP and Sindh in
these early years.
But the concept of space is determined as much by social, conceptual
and legal relationships as much as it is by physical ones.30 In some places,
frontiers and boundaries between particular spaces, especially those that
divided nations, are extended into certain ideological constructions of
the state too, and connect to other forms of social boundaries and
differences. For example, the idea of ‘Pakistan’ in the North Indian state
of UP encompassed at one and the same time: a state beyond India; a
loyalty associated with a particular minority; a ‘space of potential’, such
as ‘potential’ migration (the idea of the ‘intending evacuee’); and
a relational space that connected to the property and civic rights of
individuals as well as to recent history itself. Across the border in what
had become the Pakistani province of Sindh, ‘India’ similarly dominated
the collective imagination. In turn, the relationship between these
jurisdictional spaces (of ‘Pakistan’ in India and ‘India’ in Pakistan), being
also imaginary, formed part of a public sphere of political commentary
that had only recently emerged from forms of strong state censorship.
The idea of a ‘public sphere’ has been taken up by historians of India in
relation to new public forms of visual communication,31 and perhaps
most extensively language.32 Our concept of the public, however,
was strongly conditioned by the varied popular experiences of political
freedom in India and Pakistan’s early postcolonial years, not least
because new freedoms from 1947 included those of expression. Histor-
ians working on the notion of the ‘public sphere’ in the very different
historical context of pre-Revolutionary France have established how
public opinion, and political references to it, worked to subvert the

30
We might imagine this in terms of a ‘cultural sociology of space’, see Tim Richardson
and Ole B. Jensen, ‘Linking Discourse and Space: Towards a Cultural Sociology of
Space in Analyzing Spatial Policy Discourses’, Urban Studies 40, 1 (2003), pp. 7–22.
31
See Sandra B. Freitag, ‘South Asian Ways of Seeing, Muslim Ways of Knowing: The
Indian Muslim Niche Market in Posters’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 44, 3
(2007), pp. 297–331.
32
Two prominent examples are Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–1940:
Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2009), and Veena Naregal, Language Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere: Western India
under Colonialism (London: Anthem Press, 2002).
14 Introduction

established authorities as a result of being suppressed or limited.33 Early

postcolonial Indian and Pakistani publics had only just emerged from
colonial control and censorship, and so, from this perspective, the organs
of the public – above all the print media – provided important opportun-
ities for exploring changing views of the state, and the assertion of rights
around it.
In Boundaries of Belonging, therefore, we maintain that new forms of
public freedom in South Asia – though limited by the preoccupations of
its successor governments with security in the late 1940s and early
1950s – created a vibrant public sphere of debate about the state, its
responsibilities and what Indians and Pakistanis could expect of it.
Again, this can be seen particularly vividly for this period in the press.
Among the most important apparently autonomous state structures that
these print media discuss are those of spatial borders on the one hand
and those of the law on the other. Both are perceived as entities that
contain a sum of many parts and yet appear to be abstract, formal
frameworks. Overall, it was the process of negotiation of these structures,
as well as the discussion of them, that ultimately created a sense of
what the state was and where its power was located. This process of
negotiation by India and Pakistan’s new citizens was clearly multi-local –
taking in the relative experiences of living in different places, or the
discussion/debate about such intersecting local lives. This was the case
at moments of mass movement (or when mass movement needed to be
accommodated).
But we are cautious about overemphasizing mobility and so in addition
examine how citizens’ experiences can be very much situated in particu-
lar places, related to scales of jurisdiction and political power, from local,
to regional, national and international. Here we take account of the work
of Stephen Legg, who has suggested that ‘an emphasis on scale [can
serve] as a useful corrective to an overly networked emphasis on mobility,
flows and transit across space’.34 We also draw on Rajnarayan Chanda-
varkar’s insight that the history of urban spaces cannot be taken out of
their larger regional, national and international context, not least because
of habitual movements of workers.35 Everyday reflections on the state,
although apparently related to the local context, are never in practice so

33
James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), in particular chapter 2 ‘Opacity and Transparency:
French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century’, pp. 45–78.
34
Stephen Legg, Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities and Interwar
India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 22–3.
35
Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, History, Culture and the City (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015).
 Introduction 15

simply located but are also linked to broader notions of belonging and
exclusion. The leverage that South Asia’s citizens thought that they could
exercise in the late 1940s and 1950s – for instance, with their local
municipal corporation, or with an officer controlling a public utility in
a particular mohalla (urban neighbourhood) – was both imagined and
‘performed’ across space and scale; and it was conceptualized in relation
to other scales of the state, as well as to other spaces and places, both
imagined and real.

Ted Svensson in his comparative study of the ‘production’ of post-

colonial India and Pakistan has pointed to how, ‘in the nascent years of
Independence, notions of time and space became firmly intertwined
within the boundaries of the nation state’.36 The contours and agency
of these two nation states in the making ‘became possible and assumed
their distinct shape on the basis of a performative ‘naming’ [… and]
spatial notions [were] elevated to a position of cardinal significance
within nation building and state formation’.37 By profoundly altering
‘notions of space … and of time’, particular ‘representations of the state
and identity markers, specific traits and behaviours gained legitimacy and
authenticity at the expense of others’.38 As a result, the event of Partition
itself remained ‘central to nation building and the delimiting of state
identity in, as well as between, India and Pakistan’, with narratives – as
others have shown – continuing to unfold around this episode in both
places to the present day.39
Accordingly, India and Pakistan’s political cultures, though distinctive
in key ways, have also exhibited entwined spaces of and for citizenship at
moments of political transition. For us, these multi-local and multi-
scalar everyday interactions played themselves out most obviously and
directly in the context of post–Partition refugee rehabilitation, where
negotiation with the state involved direct claims about properties and
family histories in spaces that could now be on the other side of an
international border. But this principle applied, to differing degrees, in
a range of other negotiations, not least between citizens and the

36
Ted Svensson, Production of Postcolonial India and Pakistan: Meanings of Partition
(London and New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 19.
37 38
Ibid. Ibid., p. 1.
39
Ibid., p. 2; Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South
Asia (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 8, 29–77; Yasmin Khan, ‘The Ending of an
Empire: From Imagined Communities to Nation States in India and Pakistan’, in The
Iconography of Independence: Freedoms at Midnight, eds. Robert Holland, Susan
Williams and Terry Barringer (London and New York: Routledge, 2010),
pp. 47–56.
16 Introduction

bureaucracy, something that is also reflected in contemporary practices

around the everyday state.40 This phenomenon of interacting with the
local state, and discussing that interaction in the media, was heightened
in our period as a result of the mass movements, dislocations and
changes that occurred around Independence. Consequently, this forms
one of the central themes of Chapters 2 and 3, wherein we explore the
broad trajectory of developments playing out in our two specific contexts
or places, UP and Sindh.
Our notion of the recently created Indian and Pakistani states is that
these were entities that, in many respects, were only symbolically separ-
ated out from the social groups that they apparently served. To put it
another way, as anthropologists of the ‘everyday’ have noted, they were
‘porous’ entities and the assumed boundary between them and society
was a chimera or illusion.41 The actions of ordinary Indians and Paki-
stanis had (and continued to have) consequences for what the state ‘is’;
and also what it ‘does’. By extension, this lived reality affected (and
affects still) the limits and possibilities of citizenship rights, for Indians
and Pakistanis alike. Joya Chatterji has shown how the formal right of
Indians and Pakistanis to hold their respective passports in the early
1950s was determined largely by who moved where, and when they
moved, with this mutability eventually enshrined in citizenship legisla-
tion, namely Pakistan’s Citizenship Act of 1951 (revised in 1952) and
India’s slightly later 1955 Citizenship Act. In relation to the latter,
Chatterji describes it as a change from jus soli to jus sanguinis that was
closely connected to how the return of Muslims to India – many of them
coming back to UP from Sindh – was controlled.42 We seek to extend
Chatterji’s argument here to consider how far the actions and move-
ments of ordinary people not only affected how they claimed formal
citizen’s rights as holders of Indian and Pakistani nationality but in
addition the ways in which substantive rights were negotiated over time.
Citizens in both states undertook this process of negotiation unevenly
and hierarchically. Yet because citizens’ groups were, on the one hand, a
material part of the state, and, on the other, embroiled in the process of
its meaning and representation, the definitions and boundaries of rights
could still be changed by ‘movements of rights’ as well as by the physical
‘movements of migration’.

40
Akhil Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
41
Fuller and Benei, The Everyday State and Society, Introduction.
42
Joya Chatterji, ‘South Asian Histories of Citizenship, 1946–1970’, The Historical Journal
55, 4 (December 2012), pp. 1049–71.
 Introduction 17

Arising from these contingent processes in which the state could

assume quite different meanings to different groups of South Asian
communities, as they migrated between different jurisdictions, there came
to exist new and differentiated forms of citizenship. A useful additional
conjectural framework in this respect is the one presented by James
Holston who has explored how far marginal urban communities in Brazil,
excluded from formal civic frameworks, have innovated alternative citi-
zenship strategies. Holston’s view of the Brazilian Constitution, which
was based on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the
Citizen, is that it has historically enshrined legal inequality.43 Unlike
Brazil, such inequalities do not form part of India’s 1950 Constitution,
although, as we will explore in Chapter 6, there were categories of ‘citizen’
whose ‘pariah’ status came to be legally defined. In contrast, India’s far-
reaching ‘Fundamental Rights’ consciously sought to establish uniform
and universal entitlements. Yet, these were in tension with other, histor-
ically structured levels of rights, derived from the colonial experience,
which privileged particular community identities. India’s Constitution
(and constitutional negotiations) from the outset set up differentiated
group rights on the basis of affirmative action for certain categories of
disadvantaged citizen, based on caste, that are contained within its ‘Dir-
ective Principles of State Policy’ and ‘Fundamental Rights’. Pakistan’s
more fluid constitutional arrangements were in some respects very similar
and in others quite different. Like India, it inherited the legal tensions of
the colonial period. But, in addition from 1956 onwards, the Pakistani
Constitution differentiated formally between citizens – between Muslims
and non-Muslims and between women and men – in terms of who could
be head of state (only a male Muslim). Dichotomies in both India’s and
Pakistan’s formal constitutional rights, created spaces for the sorts of
auto-constructed urban citizenship assertions that Holston explores for
Brazil. We explore these forms of popular politics throughout Boundaries
of Belonging, and especially in Chapters 4 to 6.
In both India and Pakistan, ‘liberal’ notions of citizenship, prioritizing
the rights of individual citizens, existed as perhaps the most powerful
overarching agenda.44 These played against differentiated rights set out
for particular disadvantaged communities in some instances, and
reinforced these in others. But they contained their own contradictions.

43
James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
44
For a comparative discussion of ‘Liberal’, ‘Communitarian’ and ‘Republican’ notions of
the citizen, see Michael Lister and Emily Pia, Citizenship in Contemporary Europe
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
18 Introduction

Despite espousing the idea of ‘universal’ rights of the individual citizen,

they were historically rooted in a racialized colonial past similar to that
which had determined a modern politics of citizenship in states such as
France and Britain.45 Originating in a markedly different – European –
context, they were predicated on hierarchies that valorized teleological,
political and social ‘development’. Their assumed universal applicability,
in turn, was historically derived from the Eurocentrism that had sus-
tained colonial power and presupposed the extension of northern hemi-
sphere notions of secularism. In Boundaries of Belonging, we suggest that
alternative, popular forms of citizenship assertion (sometimes communi-
tarian) existed but that these did not always simply critique overarching
liberal notions of the citizen. In fact, they more often evoked ideas
of fundamental rights, while carving out particular spaces for further
citizenship recognition. In this sense, as has been argued in works
on colonial South Asia, alternative citizenship rights were not derived
principally from extra-legal impulses.46 It remained the case, however,
throughout the immediate post-Partition years that alternative citizen-
ship forms could be subordinated to and often hidden by state-centred
‘universal’ frameworks. While evoking some of these principles of the
universality, vernacular rights movements during these years often
defined themselves in relation to this hierarchy of subordination.

We have chosen to organize the following discussion both chronologic-

ally and thematically. This is because our aim is to look at India and
Pakistan – and UP and Sindh – together as far as possible, drawing the
post-Independence histories of both places into a joint exploration of the
region more broadly. While there are inevitably distinctions between the
developments or stories that we trace – rights as we have argued in this
Introduction being always historically produced and so highly contextual
in nature – our purpose is not to pit one location against the other. Since
the very concept of rights in the national units of Pakistan and India was
mutually interdependent and often based upon hastily conceived notions
of nation state delimitation, studying both contexts through the same
lens reveals more than the sum of its two parts. Each of our chapters
threads together material drawn from both places, paying attention to

45
Tony S. Juge and Michael P. Perez, ‘The Modern Colonial Politics of Citizenship and
Whiteness in France’, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 12,
2 (2006), pp. 187–212.
46
Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
 Introduction 19

and acknowledging similarity and difference, as well as the fact that in

neither India nor Pakistan has there been a single, all-encompassing
narrative since 1947, whatever their official state ideologies may have
wanted to communicate. Viewing them in the same frame not only allows
common themes to be explored, it also facilitates what we identify here as
powerful continuities between the pre- and post-Independence periods.
Contemporary newspaper reports (‘the first draft of history’) represent a
key set of primary sources underpinning our study, as are provincial-level
archival records (though these are more straightforward to access for UP
than in Sindh) and other official and non-official observations on the
changing landscape of both places. As with any set of sources, whether
primary or secondary, we have also faced the challenge of dealing with
potential biases within our material, compounded by the mutual suspi-
cions operating on both sides of the India-Pakistan border during these
years. But we have sought to address this by acknowledging that it is
contemporary perceptions, rather than necessarily ‘hard truths’, with
which we are engaging. The same disclaimer applies to the fact that,
unfortunately, the amount of ‘evidence’ relating to both case studies is
uneven, with more gaps as far as developments in Sindh are concerned,
as compared with what can be traced in UP. This reflects the unevenness
of archival resources in different parts of South Asia, but we hope that we
have found enough other ways to allow UP and Sindh to be explored
alongside one another.
Chapter 1 begins by analyzing developments at the state level both
before and after 1947, highlighting the figurative as well as the literal
spaces and scales wherein relationships between state ceremony, power
and the everyday were played out in the late 1940s and 1950s. By
looking at the ways that state power was performed, the role of new
and sometimes invented ceremonial traditions and the mundane but
multifaceted interactions of ordinary citizens with their new states on
different levels, the chapter explores how the Indian and Pakistani states
projected themselves in the immediate post-Independence period, and
their emphasis on patriotism and loyalty as criteria for belonging and
citizenship.
Chapter 2 then explores how far the physical movement of people that
was bound up in Partition shaped everyday meanings of ‘citizenship’ in
places like Sindh and UP where huge competition for space and
resources took place after 1947. From the outset, what we find is that
ideas about citizenship in post-Independence India and Pakistan were
intimately tied to the politics of movement. But this chapter also high-
lights that understandings of emerging citizenship were often shaped by
the very material predicaments of migrants and minorities, which
20 Introduction

operated, and so often came to be viewed as, yardsticks of belonging and

exclusion.
Chapter 3 extends this material perspective by focussing on urban
centres in Sindh and UP and on key dynamics in the development of
citizenship around the control of ‘public goods’ that emerged there.
Following an exploration of the nature of urban politics in the late
1940s and early 1950s in our two regions, the chapter explores food
and civil supply in relation to the politics of prices and price controls
and to debates about food and civil supply administration. Supply and
control of goods became a chief means in which ideas about citizens’
relationship to the state interacted with civil supply problems and other
scandals to become a point of public criticism in the press in both India
and Pakistan. This chapter then turns to the popular discourses sur-
rounding government corruption that emerged from these mechanisms
around supply of goods and its administration, setting out the new
postcolonial structures and organizations of ‘anti-corruption’ as these
mechanisms developed in both UP and Sindh. Its examination of popu-
lar views of corruption includes how particular scandals developed in the
press, and their broader meaning for ideas about citizenship rights. The
chapter concludes by considering cross-border smuggling of material
goods as an anti-state activity that raised direct questions about loyalty
and belonging.
Chapter 4 considers processes involved in constitution-building in
both states, as well as early Indian and Pakistani experiments with
democratic elections. It explores how far the concept of ‘citizen rights’
that were encapsulated within these chimed with what ordinary Indians
and Pakistanis believed their constitutional rights to be. Rather than
assuming that the two states in constitutional terms moved in opposite
directions, similarities as well as differences between the two sets of
engagement are highlighted, demonstrating the range of quotidian read-
ings of constitutional rights that emerged alongside the formal expres-
sions of citizenship entitlement. In contrast to dominant approaches that
view constitutions as canonical documents at the heart of processes of
attempted consensus, we emphasize that constitutions in both India and
Pakistan represented a process of conflict and contestation, which impli-
cated ordinary subject/citizens, their experiences of governance and their
multiple imaginaries of rights. By looking at various forms of active
citizenship engagement, this chapter highlights how quickly popular
politics in both Sindh and UP as well as more broadly in post-1947 India
and Pakistan, came to be shaped by civic circumstances, such as debates
about accessing public goods and what people perceived to be their
entitlements as ‘rights-bearing’ citizens.
 Introduction 21

Finally, Chapters 5 and 6 explore apparent contradictions bound up

in Indian and Pakistani citizenship after 1947 in relation to marginal-
ized groups living in UP and Sindh who, like their counterparts else-
where, often found it difficult to fit into officially produced templates
for citizenship. First Chapter 5 traces the efforts of women's groups to
establish their equal rights as citizens at a time of constitution-making
and legal flux, highlighting the arguments and strategies that they
pursued to make their case for fairer treatment. Then Chapter 6 shifts
the focus to (those whom we term) ‘hidden citizens’ – that is commu-
nities of people whose collective identities created problems in terms of
acquiring the full benefits of citizenship. These included religious
minorities (Muslims in India and non-Muslims in Pakistan), Dalits
and the so-called criminal tribes (vimukta jatis), whose movement
across national borders after 1947 raised repeated question marks with
respect to ‘where’ and ‘how’ they belonged. These last two chapters do
not assume that such minorities were necessarily denied citizenship
rights in a formal sense, but instead investigate what could be the
differentiated interpretation and administration of rights for them on
the ground. It also examines different means by which they and other
economically weak sections of local society sought to champion their
‘group’ rights, via legal activism, forms of political lobbying, the use of
political mediation or acquiescence in official/formal means of
extending constitutional guarantees.

By way of setting the scene for what follows in our chapters, we close
our Introduction with the following extract from an article entitled ‘India
and Pakistan To-day’, published in the British literary magazine The
Nineteenth Century only a matter of months after Partition. Written by
Sir Percival Griffiths, former colonial civil servant turned businessman,47
who had visited India and Pakistan earlier that same year, it provides an
impression (that was by no means unbiased) of the emerging relationship
between the two new states. In it, Griffiths highlighted the uncertainties
and mutual suspicion that he believed characterized interactions between
India and Pakistan at this time, and which, as Boundaries of Belonging
underlines, helped directly to shape official state policy towards, as well
as more popular citizen perceptions of, each another. All the same, to
understand developments in one place – India/UP – it is necessary to

47
Phillip Mason, ‘Obituary: Sir Percival Griffiths’, Independent, 20 July 1992,
www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-sir-percival-griffiths-1534416.html (accessed
December 2018).
22 Introduction

appreciate what was happening in the other – Pakistan/Sindh – and

vice versa. Partition may have produced two separate countries on
14/15 August 1947, but as our exploration of this key event’s aftermath
in the context of two particular localities suggests, India and Pakistan
remained intimately, and often uncomfortably, bound together by a
shared history and common challenges as they made the transition from
colonial rule to postcolonial statehood side by side in the years that
followed.
Having analyzed the internal problems of India and Pakistan, we now come to the
more delicate question of the relations between the two Dominions … Feeling
between the two Dominions is extremely bitter and the bitterness permeates all
classes of society. … Each of these allegations and counter-allegations is
discussed morning, noon and night in the house of every educated inhabitant
of India and Pakistan, and in the process, as always happens when people brood
over grievances, a bitterness out of all proportion to the magnitude of the causes
is generated. It is also to be remembered that Pakistan genuinely believes that
India intends to crush her if she can, and that, on the other side, many Hindus in
India still consider that India should never have agreed to partition. Clearly all
the elements out of which international quarrels develop are present here in a
virulent form.48

48
Sir Percival Griffiths, ‘India and Pakistan To-Day’, The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 143,
no. 852 (1948), in FO 371/69729, UK National Archives.
1 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India
and Pakistan

On the first anniversary of Independence in August 1948, with tension

mounting between India and Pakistan over the future of the Princely
State of Hyderabad (Deccan) and its Muslim minority population,1 the
Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru broadcast to the nation from the
same spot in Delhi where he had delivered his ‘Tryst with Destiny’
speech twelve months before:
Free India is one year old today. But what trials and tribulations she has
passed through during this infancy of her freedom. She has survived in spite
of all the perils and disaster that might well have overwhelmed a more mature
and well-established nation … We have to find ourselves again and go back to
[the] free India of our dreams. We have to re-discover old values and place
them in the new setting of [a]free India. For freedom brings responsibility and
can only be sustained by self-discipline, hard work and [the] spirit of a free
people.
Nehru then concluded with the following impassioned ‘call to arms’:
Let us be rid of everything that limits us and degrades us. Let us cast [off] our fear
and communalism and provincialism. Let us build up a free and democratic
India where [the] interests of the masses, our people, has always the first place to
which all other interests must submit. Freedom has no meaning unless it brings
relief to these masses from their many burdens. Democracy means tolerance,

1
For a detailed exploration of political developments taking place in Hyderabad (Deccan)
before, during and after its incorporation within the Indian Union in 1948, and the issues
that these raised for wider issues involved in how Indian citizenship was evolving at this
time, see Taylor C. Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India: Negotiating Citizenship in
Postcolonial Hyderabad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). See also Taylor
C. Sherman, ‘The Integration of the Princely State of Hyderabad and the Making of the
Postcolonial State in India, 1948–1956’, Indian Economic & Social History Review 44, 4
(2007), pp. 489–516; Taylor C. Sherman, ‘Migration, Citizenship and Belonging in
Hyderabad (Deccan), 1948–1956’, Modern Asian Studies 45, 1 (2011), pp. 81–107;
Sunil Purushotham, ‘Internal Violence: The “Police Action” in Hyderabad’,
Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, 2 (2015), pp. 435–66; and, for a
contemporary assessment, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, ‘Hyderabad: Muslim Tragedy’,
Middle East Journal 4, 1 (January 1950), pp. 27–51.

23
24 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan

tolerance not merely of those who agree with us but of those who do not
agree with us.2
As this attempt in the summer of 1948 to enlist fellow Indians in a ‘war’
to resolve some of the myriad problems caused by Partition underlines,
all new regimes create, revive and mobilize political symbols – both
material and rhetorical – as a means of consolidating power and simul-
taneously propagating visions of shared citizenship. Politicians and gov-
ernments in Pakistan and India in the immediate post-Independence
period followed distinctive strategies in their promotion of national
iconographies and views of the ideal citizen.3 But how these were re-
circulated – in different localities, by a range of different institutions and
movements, and sometimes through the spontaneous response to them
by ‘crowds’ – affected their meaning and impact over time. Furthermore,
their transmission was far from passive thanks to the ways in which such
symbols can themselves be transformed as a result of precisely this kind
of circulation taking place at different social and spatial scales.4 This
opening chapter, therefore, begins our exploration of postcolonial citi-
zenship by considering how far – for India and Pakistan during their early
years – the process of ‘making citizens’ was also about consolidating the
unitary state in ways that could often allow each country to emulate the
other, despite contrasting contexts.
Following Independence and Partition, politicians supported by bur-
eaucrats at the centre, whether they were located in the new capital cities
of Delhi or Karachi, expressed a clear desire to manage or contain
regional difference and to promote a strongly centralized unitary form
of government. In this, irrespective of location, they were clearly influ-
enced by their shared experiences of British rule and the political as well
as the administrative structures that they had been bequeathed. And
crucially, both encountered difficulties, at the state or provincial level,
which highlighted the contingency of citizenship in the transition from
colonial rule to independent government. But while India inherited most
of its political, administrative, judicial and security structures largely
intact, Pakistan was required to build a centralized state from the remains
of provincial administrative structures, which in the case of the Punjab
and Bengal had hurriedly been cut in two. This meant that in Pakistan

2
Indian News Bulletin: ‘“The only war we want to fight, with all our might, is the war
against poverty” says Pandit Nehru’, 16 August 1948, FO371/69735 UK National
Archives (hereafter UKNA).
3
Srirupa Roy, Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2007).
4
Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma, ‘Culture of Circulation: The Imaginations of
Modernity’, Public Culture 14, 1 (2002), pp. 191–3.
 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan 25

(by comparison to India) the choices of unitary symbols were dependent

on a more unstable – arguably artificial – balance of regional identities
and likewise heavily influenced by the political circumstances at the
moment of Independence alongside the wielding of the religious
card, that is, Islam. In other words, Pakistan did not have as many
‘ready-made’ national histories on which to base the idea of a unitary
independent identity as India did, and, as a result, in the words of
Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘Pakistan was born of a partition which over-
determined its subsequent trajectory’.5 The choice to pursue a unitary
political system, and the symbols that accompanied this, therefore, had
different outcomes for each country.
All the same, official government-driven attempts to propagate civic
notions of national belonging could be contested at different scales,
within formal institutions and in popular movements in both countries.
For Pakistan, this involved, at one level, a tension between local
(Punjabi) and migrant (muhajir) cultures that were dominant in the
army, administration and politics, against demographically important
regional identities, especially in East Bengal but also present in other
provinces. In contrast, the idea of the Indian ‘citizen’ was more atomized
given that country’s greater size and resultant complexities, but equally,
this process turned out to be no less about the consolidation of power
around certain majoritarian symbols for the new regime.6 For the Indian
government, following Independence, it was not as if ideas of the nation
had to be invented afresh as in Pakistan. Quite the opposite. The
last century of colonial rule in the subcontinent had produced richly
documented and highly contentious debates about ‘Indian-ness’ and
the ‘Indian people’, from which the notion of ‘Pakistan’ itself had arisen
as one dynamic, in terms of political representation7 and the politics of
identity.8 However, when we focus specifically on citizenship, with all that
this implied in terms of actual or anticipated constitutional rights, rather
than the nation state as a whole, we can see that there were a range of

5
Christophe Jaffrelot, The Pakistan Paradox: Instability and Resilience (London: Hurst,
2015), p. 1.
6
Roy, Beyond Belief, chapter 1, argues that the state was the essential unifier, via a range of
institutions of this vision.
7
Francis Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces’
Muslims, 1860–1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 163–4.
8
This is particularly the case when we consider the institutional basis of the ‘Pakistan’
movement, the Muslim League, which in key mobilizational phases of the early 1920s
around the Khilafat balanced ‘pan-Islamism’ with Indian nationalism, in terms of two
overlapping ‘circles’ of identity. See Mushirul Hasan, ‘The Khilafat Movement:
A Reappraisal’, Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in Colonial India (Delhi: Manohar,
1985), pp. 1–16.
26 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan

contingent events, on occasion revolving around large-scale ceremonies,

which complicated the symbols that each country used to reinforce its
new national identity.
After 14/15 August 1947, South Asia’s new postcolonial regimes
quickly realized that opportunities had arisen to shape cultures of
national identity together with citizenship values by connecting popular
political symbols to state power. In India and Pakistan alike, this object-
ive was pursued repeatedly in a series of staged ceremonial occasions,
some of them serendipitous and others deliberately planned around the
annual calendar marking such values as ‘Independence’ and the ‘Repub-
lic’. This chapter accordingly takes as its starting point the impact of two
key happenings – the deaths and subsequent funerals of Gandhi and
Jinnah in January and September 1948, respectively. It explores their
fallout in terms of the ceremonies that they triggered and locates them
within the broader assortment of ceremonial processes that took place
at a range of regional and political scales during this period, before
considering ways in which India and Pakistan projected their authority
vis-à-vis their citizens during these nation-building years. In particular,
while this chapter’s purview inevitably extends to more general develop-
ments as well, it focusses particularly on reactions in two specific places,
namely the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) and the Pakistani province
of Sindh, where issues connected with ‘belonging’ lay at the heart of
much discussion about the evolving relationship between the postcolo-
nial state and its citizens.

Personifying the Postcolonial State

An early pivotal moment for the new Indian government as far as the
special use of symbolic nation-building ceremonies was concerned
followed the demise of one of the masters of large-scale mobilization
itself. On 30 January 1948, while at a prayer meeting in the gardens of
Birla House in New Delhi, Gandhi came face to face with a Hindu
extremist, Nathuram Godse, who shot him three times at point-blank
range. In a real sense, the response to the murder provided India’s new
postcolonial regime with an opportunity to settle some political scores,
but it also suggested, in a microcosm, how the use of commonly agreed
national symbols could be interpreted and remoulded in multiple quo-
tidian ways. Less than nine months later, with Jinnah’s death from
natural causes on 11 September, the new authorities in Karachi faced a
similar challenge and reached similar conclusions.
In the weeks preceding Gandhi’s assassination in early 1948, his efforts
had shifted from Calcutta to Delhi where more and more Hindu and
 Personifying the Postcolonial State 27

Sikh refugees were arriving from the Pakistani province of Sindh, ‘with
their uncompromising bitterness towards the Muslims’, and Delhi
Muslims in large numbers were ‘leaving their homes in the mixed local-
ities of the city and concentrating themselves in those areas where
Muslims had a preponderating majority’. Gandhi – in his efforts to
restore ‘communal peace’ and ‘keeping in remarkably close touch with
Indian opinion’ – campaigned for sufficient reconciliation between com-
munities to allow ‘Muslims to return in safety to their homes in Delhi
and non-Muslims to Pakistan’.9 When he broke what turned out to be his
final fast on 18 January,10 it was in response to receiving assurances from
all communities in Delhi that Muslim life, property and religion would
be both respected and protected. The press also pointed out the effects of
the fast in Pakistan as well as among Muslim leaders in India.11
But in the first few hours, as the news of Gandhi’s death spread, there
was the fear that a Muslim might have been responsible. Violent reprisal
attacks against Muslims consequently occurred in Lucknow and
Bombay,12 and military commanders all over India were told to stand
by in case of an emergency in other cities.13 Within the space of a few
days, once it became known that the attacker was a member of the Hindu
right-wing organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS),
arrests took place, rounding up members of that militaristic organization
and declaring it illegal.14 This led to mass arrests in Allahabad and
Kanpur, and popular attacks on the main RSS offices in the latter city.15
Similar arrests were made of Hindu Mahasabha leaders.16 The assassin-
ation thus provided state governments with an opportunity to maintain
public order in response to the ‘volunteer’ organizations that dated from
the war years and were still operating. Indeed, this was the context for the

9
UK High Commissioner, New Delhi, Despatch 25, 4 February 1948, FO371/
69729 UKNA.
10
The Hindi newspapers of UP followed the fast in some detail; see ‘Hindu-Muslim ekta
ke liye Gandhiji ka anashan, desh tatha dharmke vinash ka ashaak darshak hone ki bajah
mar jana accha. Prarthnake Pashchat Mahatma Gandhiki Ghoshna Congress tatha
sarkarom mem bhrashtachaar se dukhi sabhi’, Aaj, 16 January 1948.
11
‘Gandhiji ke anashan se bharat-pakistan donon hi chintit’, Aaj, 17 January 1948.
12
UKHC, New Delhi, Opdom, First Half February 1948, IOR L/PJ/8/794 British Library
(hereafter BL).
13
A. C. B. Symon, 4 February 1948, ‘The Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and Liaquat
Ali Khan’, FCO371/69729 UKNA.
14
See, for instance, ‘Ban in Provinces: 50 Arrests in UP’, National Herald, 5
February 1948.
15
‘Kanpur mein Updrav aur curfew rashtriy svayansevak sangh aur jantaa mein sangharsh’,
Aaj, 4 February 1948.
16
‘Bombay aur Puna mein giraftariyan hindu sabha ke netaon ke ghar par bhir ke hamle’,
Aaj, 3 February 1948.
28 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan

passage of the 1948 United Provinces Maintenance of Public Order Bill,

which sought to prevent the members of volunteer organizations from
wearing any uniform or article of apparel that resembled in any way what
was worn by the police or military called out to quell disturbances.17
In UP too, to allay public fears, newspapers claimed to be able to provide
detailed figures of arrests: in Lucknow it was reported that many of
UP’s RSS men had gone underground and that the government had
decided to sequester their property. Reported arrests included those in
Aligarh (twenty), Allahabad (eight), Bahraich (twenty), Budaun (eight),
Ballia (five), Jaunpur, Lakhimpur (fifteen) and Meerut (twenty-five). In
Hardoi, anti-Gandhi posters were found, while in Bara Banki the district
organizer was charged for assaulting a Congressman and in Fatehpur five
RSS members were arrested for distributing sweets in celebration of
Gandhi’s death.18
In the Constituent Assembly, India’s first Home Minister and Deputy
Prime Minister Vallabhai Patel fielded awkward questions about whether
government servants could still belong to ‘communal organizations’ such
as the RSS. His reply was that they were prohibited from political groups
as well as from those ‘which [tended] directly or indirectly to promote
feelings of hatred and enmity between different classes or disturb public
peace’, although social welfare groups were exempted.19 Patel himself,
who had been seen as a leader with some sympathies for the Hindu Right
of the Congress, also came under fire from a number of sources for
apparently not taking sufficient care over the security linked to Gandhi’s
final prayer meeting. Overseas reporters closely monitoring these
unfolding developments suggested that their repercussions might spread
to Pakistan, where there was a danger of them stimulating a ‘communal
frenzy’, given preaching by the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS against
Pakistan.20
Yasmin Khan has shown how Gandhi’s funeral and the subsequent
dispersal of his ashes to different parts of India operated as a key mech-
anism for the consolidation of Congress power together with the idea of
the secular state.21 However, in extending Khan’s argument, it is clear

17
‘The United Provinces Maintenance of Public Order (Second Amendment) Bill, 1948’,
Ministry of Home Affairs Judicial F 5/37/48 National Archives of India (hereafter NAI).
18
‘Many RSS Men in UP Go Underground’, National Herald, 6 February 1948.
19
‘Question in the Constituent Assembly by Shri Damodar Swarup Seth Regarding the
Joining of Communal and Social Organisations by Govt Servants’, Ministry of Home
Affairs Ests 15/18/48 NAI.
20
‘Indian Reformer Is Shot at Point Blank Range by a Hindu Nationalist’, Manchester
Guardian, 31 January 1948.
21
Yasmin Khan, ‘Performing Peace: Gandhi’s Assassination as a Critical Moment in the
Consolidation of the Nehruvian Secular State’, in From Subjects to Citizens: Society and the
 Personifying the Postcolonial State 29

Figure 1.1 Indian leaders carry the ashes of Mohandas K. Gandhi,

Allahabad, 19 February 1948.
Photo by Bettmann/Getty Images

that quotidian responses to national symbols could often test these larger
ideas on the basis of regional and local readings of India’s past. Certainly,
extraordinary scenes of public grief followed Gandhi’s death, with one of
UP’s prominent newspapers including only one column on its front page
as an expression of national shock and mourning, the day after the
assassination.22 A large-scale funeral in New Delhi was followed by a
two-week official mourning and then the immersion of his ashes in the
Ganges. The public reaction involved immense numbers of people, with
reportedly more than a million congregating in the city of Allahabad
alone (see Figure 1.1).23 The political symbolism of this national event
conveyed the tragedies of religious conflict (Gandhi had been killed at
the hands of a Hindu extremist), and, by extension, the urgency of
‘secularism’ and the triumph of the Congress as its main champion.24
This in itself was a powerful symbolic resource for Congress politicians,
shortly following Independence, not least because the apparent threat of

Everyday State in India and Pakistan, 1947–1970, eds. Taylor Sherman, William Gould
and Sarah Ansari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 64–89.
22
‘Unmaad ki vedi par mana balidaan! Garib, ashaath, aur piditka sahara tut gaya
rashtrapita mahatma Gandhi ki hatya hatyara jantadwara pakra gaya: Sara Bharat jagat
shok santap aur chintagrast’, Aaj, 1 February 1948.
23
The Times, 13 February 1948. This number was also used by the British High
Commissioner in Delhi.
24
Khan, ‘Performing Peace’.
30 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan

both the right-wing of the Congress and right-wing parties such as the
Hindu Mahasabha was still significant in the lead-up to the first national
elections of 1951–2. Hindu traditionalists, including Purushottam Das
Tandon who was successfully elected as Congress president in 1950,
were in the ascendant as a result of the refugee crisis and the desire
by some within the party to assimilate the right-wing RSS outfit (despite
its ban following Gandhi’s death) into the Congress Party organization
itself.25
But it was the forms by which symbols of reconciliation and secularism
were scaled both upwards and downwards which marked the extraordin-
ary translatability of these events to a range of public contexts. As we will
see later, local responses often challenged or subverted official narratives.
Gandhi’s death allowed the new Congress-led regime to consolidate its
power – both at local and symbolic levels – in its strategic use of the state
apparatus and in the strengthening of Nehru’s executive authority.26 The
huge official funeral, which passed through the grand colonial spaces of
Delhi, was witnessed by crowds lining the malls as its key audience in a
specific set of Delhi-based rituals (see Figure 1.2). Khan shows how, in
the aftermath of the funeral, there was a clamour for Gandhi’s bodily
remains.27 Once Gandhi’s pyre was lit on the evening of 31 January,
Nehru had to issue orders to save throngs of people (the overall crowd
numbered between 700,000 and one million) from falling into the fire.28
At the specific location where the Mahatma had died, now considered by
many to be a sacred site, people gathered up handfuls of the earth,
leaving a large hole in the ground. Raj Ghat later became a memorial
park for a range of other leaders – a sacred cremation space on the banks
of the Yamuna, which related to Delhi’s complex historical geography.29
At the same time, the effect of Gandhi’s passing was experienced in a
multitude of other spaces. The UP press made a great deal of the
international responses to the assassination.30
It was in the use of Gandhi’s ashes that the spatial underpinnings of the
new regime’s secularism were most clearly demonstrated. Ashes were
distributed from Delhi to all the states of India where they were scattered

25
Bruce Graham, Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics: The Origins and Development of the
Bharatiya Jana Sangh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 19–22.
26
Khan, ‘Performing Peace’, p. 68. 27
Ibid., pp. 79–83.
28
A. C. B. Symon, 4 February 1948, ‘The Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and Liaquat
Ali Khan’, FCO371/69729 UKNA.
29
Mira Debs, ‘Using Cultural Trauma: Gandhi’s Assassination, Partition and Secular
Nationalism in Post-Independence India’, Nations and Nationalism 19, 4 (October
2013), pp. 635–53.
30
‘Sara sansar stammit, London, Washington shok’, Aaj, 1 February 1948; ‘Videshon
mein shok’, Aaj, 4 February 1948.
 Personifying the Postcolonial State 31

Figure 1.2 People watching Mohandas K. Gandhi’s funeral, Delhi,

31 January 1948.
Photo by Margaret Bourke-White/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

in local rivers, linking together the country’s physical and political geo-
graphy. This well-publicized network extended out from Delhi and,
importantly, was under direct Congress control and supervision. It
seemed far from coincidental that several of the locations set for receipt
of his ashes were areas of religious conflict – for instance, the Punjab in
the north-west and Hyderabad (Deccan) in the south.31
Ironically, shortly before his death Gandhi had as usual been protest-
ing about matters that linked the local and quotidian to the national.32
Undertaking a fast for ‘communal unity’ in the context of the refugee

31
Khan, ‘Performing Peace’, p. 77.
32
‘Gandhiji ke anashan se bharat-pakistan donon hi chintit’, Aaj, 17 January 1948.
32 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan

problem in Delhi in early 1948 in response to communal tensions, he had

set out the conditions for the breaking of his protest: the annual fair at the
dargah (shrine) of the early thirteenth-century Muslim mystic Khawja
Bakhtyar (also known as Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki), he argued, should
be held, and Muslims ought be able to join it without fear; all mosques
which in recent riots in Delhi had been converted into temples or
residential accommodation needed to be returned to Muslims to become
mosques again; Muslims should be able to move about without fear in
formerly Muslim-majority areas of Delhi such as Karolbagh, Sabzimundi
and Paharganj; Hindus should not object to the return of Muslims
to Delhi; Muslims had the right to travel in railway trains without any
risks; there should be no economic boycott of Muslims and the accom-
modation of non-Muslims in Muslim areas ought be left entirely to the
discretion of the residents of those areas.33
As on many previous occasions, just before his murder Gandhi had
successfully created publicity around a controversy that connected to
high-level political struggles within the Congress Party and which had
repercussions through India’s entire polity. Official reports on Gandhi’s
motivation for fasting in early 1948, as related to India’s Governor
General Mountbatten, set out the former’s annoyance at the policy of
Patel towards Delhi’s Muslims.34 The external – British – interpretation
was that the fast was as much designed to bring reconciliation between
the two leaders as it was about the city’s Muslim inhabitants,35 and the
controversy was even accompanied by positive reflections on Gandhi’s
motives in the Pakistani press.36 Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the leading
Congress Muslim politician, also described how Patel remained ‘indiffer-
ent’ to the fasting, believing that these actions were directed at him, and
as a result – Azad claimed – this affected local security arrangements
for Gandhi in Delhi. Patel’s apparent lack of concern came back to
haunt him following the Mahatma’s death. Gandhian politicians such
as Jayaprakash Narayan and Prafulla Chandra Ghosh both held Patel
publicly responsible for the lack of protection. Consequently, Gandhi’s
protests concerning the treatment of Muslims in India, together with his
subsequent assassination, had a range of disciplinary repercussions for
the Congress Party, and individual figures associated with it. There were
knock-on consequences that filtered down to local Congress committees
and to low-level administrators. Police, for instance, investigated those
allegedly holding public meetings to celebrate Gandhi’s death, with such

33
National Herald, 18 January 1948.
34 35
A. C. B. Symon, 25 January 1948, DO133/93 UKNA. Ibid.
36
UKCOM, ‘Reactions to Gandhi’s Fast’, 17 January 1948, DO133/93 UKNA.
 Personifying the Postcolonial State 33

events taking place in Gwalior and Jaipur where sweets were distrib-
uted;37 and two kanungos (local revenue officers) in Ghaziabad district,
B. K. Mathur Tahsildar and Anand Swarup, faced punishments for
various misdemeanours, including the claim that they ‘indulged in drink-
ing wine on the night of Gandhiji’s assassination’.38
Perhaps the most important quotidian significance of Gandhi’s death
was the range of implications that it had, on the one hand, for spontan-
eous popular protests around communal organizations and, on the other,
for generating opportunities for local policemen and administrators to
settle old as well as new scores. Exploring the spontaneous reactions that
took place, we gain a sense of how ordinary citizens in urban UP and
beyond identified with the larger symbols of national belonging. The
news of Gandhi’s death created shock across the city of Banaras, and
both Hindu and Muslim shops simultaneously closed. All public
employees took a day off.39 Importantly, a similar spontaneous closure
of shops also took place in Karachi, Sindh.40 More directly, there was an
attack by a large mob on the house of Veer Savarkar (Hindu Mahasabha
leader) in the Dadar Mahim area of Bombay,41 and a student demon-
stration in Lucknow in support of Gandhi and against the various organ-
izations deemed responsible for his demise.42 There were also local-level
clampdowns on the Muslim National Guard and Khaksars, including
community leaders who had held, for instance, the Chairmanship of the
Bahraich Board.43 In other centres in UP, opportunities were presented
for assimilating RSS cadres into the Congress, with speakers at a meeting
held by the president of the Lucknow Congress Committee suggesting
that all (banned) RSS members should be absorbed into the Congress
Seva Dal in each mohalla (urban neighbourhood).44
Clearly, as these instances collectively testify, the political moment
created by Gandhi’s assassination, alongside the very public ceremony
of his funeral generated by the regime itself, allowed for new and spon-
taneous material interactions between citizens and the political process.
In a very real sense, and in a way quite different to mass mobilizations in
the colonial era, people involved in street politics were now able to

37
Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, India Wins Freedom: The Complete Version (Delhi: Stosius
Inc., 1988), pp. 243-5.
38
‘Complaint against Shri Anand Swarup Supr. Kanungo Meerut’, Revenue (B), Box 113,
file 1029B/1950 UP State Archives (hereafter UPSA).
39
‘Hamara Nagar: “Rashtrapita Gandhiji ki mrtyupar shok-sabha beniyabag mein shanivar
ko 4 Baje”’, Aaj, 1 February 1948.
40
‘Pakistan mein Sarkari Chhutti: sara vaveshya bhi bandh’, Aaj, 3 February 1948.
41
National Herald, 2 February 1948; Aaj, 2 February 1948.
42 43
National Herald, 3 February 1948. National Herald, 10 February 1948.
44
National Herald, 9 February 1948.
34 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan

engage directly with the political theories of Gandhism and Nehruvian

secularism. In addition, the anticipation of fresh political freedoms, and
the now poignant ‘example’ of Gandhi, had brought a heightened sense
of how new governments were expected to operate: how, in particular,
there was an acknowledged need to move away from the old bureaucratic
approaches of British India.45 Decolonization, in short, cultivated new
public expectations that postcolonial regimes sought to channel and
control, but which were exposed very clearly in such times of collective
uncertainty.
Gandhi could not have died at a better time for the new regime under
Nehru’s leadership, for three significant reasons. First, developments just
before his death represented a means for potentially bolstering the secu-
lar ideology of Nehru, something that he could use to confront the
position of his rival, the more religiously conservative Patel. This would
prove to be significant in the context of a renewed social and political
conservatism evident in Indian Constituent Assembly debates of 1948–9
concerning refugees, women’s rehabilitation and the hard line that
was being urged in relation to Pakistan. Second, the specific timing of
Gandhi’s death, shortly after the already-fixed ‘Independence Day’ of
26 January (later to become ‘Republic Day’) that two years afterwards
would be the date on which the Constitution was inaugurated, brought
together two key memorial events. These directly served a politics of
reconciliation and the idea of the rootedness of the Congress organiza-
tion in the rights of the Constitution itself. Finally, while few were
embarrassed to evoke Gandhi while he was alive, his death and accom-
panying ‘loss’ to India – at least for a time – provided another public
opportunity to celebrate Gandhian values. This readiness was strongly
reflected in contemporary press editorials. As The Hindu declared on
31 January 1948,
… let us face, as the Prime Minister exhorts us to do, all the perils that encompass
us – and they are many and grave … If we are true to Gandhiji’s teachings,
nothing must deflect us from considering all classes, castes and communities as
children of the same mother, entitled to equal rights and – what is not less
important – charged with equal responsibilities, all acting in harmony,
earnestness and unison in the interest of the nation as a whole.46

But beyond local politics and street demonstrations, the force of

Gandhi’s murder lay in the effect it had on political debate and media

45
The Hindi newspaper Aaj, for instance, printed a list of the times that Gandhi went to jail
and his Satyagraha movements as an example, ‘Bharat Pran Gandhiji ki jivan jhanki
1934 mein Puna mein bam dwara hatyaka vifal praytna’, Aaj, 1 February 1948.
46
‘Gandhiji’, The Hindu, 31 January 1948.
 Personifying the Postcolonial State 35

commentaries. Gandhian ideas, especially given the violent and precipi-

tate nature of his death, were represented as both universal and eternal in
a range of forums. Many reflected on his calls for political morality, such
as their use by a pamphleteer, Amar Nath Shastri, writing to Nehru in
1948 about Gandhi’s passing as an explanation for state corruption,
together with the need for his memory to keep things ‘clean’.47 Others
complained about political selections to constituencies, either against
those who had made celebratory speeches when Gandhi had died,48 or
in favour of those who claimed to have planned events in celebration.49
Gandhian ideas affected forms of public morality in other ways: in
Bombay in 1950, the local government refused to certify a cigarette
advertising film entitled Ek Kash Ki Kahani (A Story of a Puff ) for
Cavender’s Cigarettes. The film, censors argued, associated the father
of the nation with its propaganda to encourage smoking, especially as it
contained sequences with Gandhi’s photograph, smokers in a cloth shop
and ‘the anger of a mother-in-law’ dispelled by the aroma of cigarette
smoke.50
Hence, the timing of Gandhi’s death was a gift that could keep giving
for the Congress. Its anniversary each year neatly coincided with annual
Republic Days, allowing and encouraging public engagement to meld
the memory of this with a particular ‘reading’ of the Indian Constitution
itself. At an address at a public meeting on Sarvodaya Day at the Ramlila
Grounds, New Delhi, on 30 January 1950, Nehru’s speech about the
Republic suggested to the audience that ‘perhaps you may already be
aware of your rights – little more clearly than is necessary – but it is
equally necessary to know your responsibilities, otherwise a nation
cannot function’. Nehru deliberately phrased his call in terms of Gand-
hian notions of how unjust laws could be changed via a consensus

47
‘Drive to check and ultimately eradicate corruption and bribe’, by Amar Nath Sharma,
in Public ‘Anti-corruption office efficiency. Suggestions regarding efficiency and anti-
corruption drive in government of Indian ministries’, Home Public F 51/65/48 UPSA.
48
In the Meerut constituency in March 1948, Balkrishna Sharma made such a complaint
against a rival, L. Bhagwat Prasad. See Balkrishna Sharma, to Pres. UPPCC, 24 March
1948, in ‘Appeals against Sardar Teja Singh’, AICC Papers, Election Files 4603/1951,
Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (hereafter NMML).
49
‘Appeal against the decision of the UP congress PB rejecting Shri Chandra Bali Shastri
for the UP Assembly from Muhammadabad south dist Azamgarh’, AICC Papers,
Election Files 4617/1951 NMML. Shastri claimed to have organized a huge party ‘for
1000 Harijans’ two weeks after Gandhi’s death.
50
Cinematograph Films, ‘Ek kash ki kahani’, General Administration Department
(hereafter GAD) 705/7(93)1950 UPSA.
36 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan

Figure 1.3 A view of M. A. Jinnah’s funeral, Karachi,

12 September 1948.
Photo by Dawn archive

between the will of the government and the will of the people,51 something
that required not just the legal implementation of the Constitution but its
active connection to civic responsibilities.52 Such connections allowed the
leadership to safely re-enact popular struggles with autocracy, which (via
reference to Gandhi) stood aside and above global materialism. Crucially,
too, they affected Nehru’s own projected policy towards Pakistan, which
served a dual purpose of relative reconciliation on the international stage,
together with internal control of the Congress right wing: by speaking of
the ‘panic and fear’ of the Pakistani press, Nehru emphasized the need for
India not to resort to ‘panic and fear’ in relation to Pakistan.53
Across the border, like Gandhi’s funeral, that of Jinnah held later the
same year in Pakistan’s federal capital city of Karachi represented an
early ‘ceremonial’ opportunity for the embryonic Pakistani state to pro-
ject itself (see Figure 1.3). News of Jinnah’s death on 11 September

51
‘Gandhian Ideals for the Nation’, address at a public meeting in connection with
Sarvodaya Day on the second death anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, Ramlila
Grounds, New Delhi, 30 January 1950. AIR Tapes, translated from Hindi. Selected
Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (hereafter SWJN), Vol. 14, Pt. 1, No. 7, pp. 261, 263.
52 53
Ibid., p. 269. Ibid., p. 268.
 Personifying the Postcolonial State 37

1948 stunned Pakistan’s new citizens. Although he did not die

unexpectedly like Gandhi at the hands of an assassin, Jinnah had been
growing steadily more unwell for some time – he had suffered from
tuberculosis since the 1930s and then developed lung cancer. But aware-
ness of Jinnah’s declining health had been kept a closely guarded secret,
and so his passing took most Pakistanis by surprise. Nor was this collect-
ive grief helped by the revelation that the ambulance transporting him
from Karachi airport to his official residence had broken down en route,
forcing him to wait at the side of the road for an hour before a replace-
ment vehicle arrived. Jinnah’s body was placed on public view at
Government House where thousands visited to pay their respects. The
enormous number of assembled mourners – a reported million people
gathered in the city – who lined the three-mile-long funeral route the
following day was credited with behaving in the main with admirable
discipline, though, as one British High Commission report noted, ‘the
vast crowds who swarmed around the bier … at one point completely
disorganized the official programme’.54 In an interesting and perhaps
telling inversion of what had happened in India, British Pathé newsreel,
which filmed the sea of people attending Jinnah’s funeral, showed
mourners scattering soil that had apparently been brought from ‘all over
the new nation’ on his grave. In contrast to the nationwide distribution of
Gandhi’s ashes mentioned above, this ceremony materially and meta-
phorically sought to connect in symbolic fashion the country’s constituent
parts with its newly created political centre in Karachi.55 Whereas the
Congress had quickly realized the necessity to extend its authority out-
wards to other states in the lead-up to the first general elections in India,
in Pakistan the problem was still one of the need or desire to centralize.
The Indian High Commissioner who attended Jinnah’s funeral along
with other members of the diplomat corps present in Karachi described
events in detail to the authorities back in Delhi:
[Members of the diplomatic corps] turned up in full force, most of them in full
morning dress with toppers. Jinnah lay on a low bed covered with a white sheet
with a few rose petals strewn thereon. His face was bare, eyes closed and mouth
open. I learn now that this was because he wore false teeth which according to
Muslim custom are not buried with the body. The face showed acute and
prolonged suffering, was horribly emaciated and shrivelled, and it looked as if
the man had been dead a long while and not only the night before as given out.
Zafrullah [Khan, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister] was very composed. I thought

54
UKHC, ‘Pakistan: Monthly Appreciation of Events’, No. 9 for September 1948, IOR L/
WS/1/1599 BL.
55
Khan, ‘Performing Peace’, pp. 81–5.
38 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan

I detected even a faint smile flickering about his lips. He was the first to shoulder
the bier. The procession itself numbered over a lakh [100,000] and was most
orderly. Everyone was on foot. There were no women except Fatima Jinnah,
Jinnah’s daughter Mrs. Wadia, Lady Hidayatullah [wife of the Governor of
Sindh] and Mrs. Tyabji, wife of the Chief Judge of the Sind Court.56

With government offices closed for three days, private businesses were
not legally obliged to shut, but most chose to do so, though the spontan-
eity of shared grief was marred by the presence of roving bands of ‘self-
appointed enforcers’ who reportedly caused unpleasant scenes, including
setting fire to one of Karachi’s principal restaurants.57 On 22 October,
the final act in Jinnah’s mourning ceremonies (chelum) took place when a
crowd estimated by observers at around 400,000 assembled near his
burial place to pray and to listen to tributes from the country’s top
leaders.58 The main focus of the speech by the new Governor General
Khwaja Nazimuddin was the need for ‘faith, unity and discipline if
Jinnah’s creation – Pakistan – was to reach fruition’: ‘the people’, he
advised, ought to ‘scrupulously refrain from raising issues likely to create
disruption or weaken authority and it was everyone’s duty to join [the]
armed forces and to subscribe to defence loans’.59 On the occasion of Eid
ul Azha, as part of the Hajj ceremonies, a few weeks later, Nazimuddin
called on Pakistanis to dedicate themselves to ‘the task nearest to the
Quaid-i-Azam’s heart – the establishment of a model Islamic state in
Pakistan, a task requiring untiring effort, devotion to duty and a spirit of
sacrifice’,60 and ‘thousands [were said to have already made] pilgrimage

56
Deputy High Commissioner, Karachi, to Ministry of External Affairs and
Commonwealth Relations, New Delhi, 17 September 1948, MEA/2-1, 48 – Pak
I (Vol. I), NAI. According to contemporary Indian sources, the view generally held in
diplomatic circles was that the official story of Jinnah’s death was not true and that Jinnah
probably died in Quetta or on the plane, and that neither Liaquat Ali Khan nor Zafrullah
Khan or any other ‘bigwig’ in Karachi knew of his death until after it had occurred. Both
Liaquat and Zafrullah had been attending a function given by the French Ambassador in
honour of the Pakistan delegation to the United Nations, and neither had apparently
shown any traces of anxiety as reportedly ‘Liaquat Ali was full of spirits and Zafrullah his
usual cool self’, ibid.
57
Charles Lewis, US Chargé d’affaires (Karachi) to US Secretary of State, 15 September
1948, www.humsafar.info/doc_480915_us.php (accessed December 2018). The
premises set alight were that of the Central Hotel, a sizeable establishment run along
European lines, where the bar was open and people found to be drinking there. See
Deputy High Commissioner, Karachi, to Ministry of External Affairs and
Commonwealth Relations, New Delhi, 17 September 1948, MEA/2-1, 48 – Pak
I (Vol. I) NAI.
58
UKHC, ‘Pakistan: Monthly Appreciation of the General Situation’, No. 10 for October
1949, IOR L/WS/1/1599 BL.
59
UKHC, Karachi, Opdom 85, 22–8 October 1948, IOR L/WS/1/1599 BL.
60
UKHC, Karachi, Opdom 82, 8–14 October 1948, IOR L/WS/1/1599 BL.
 Personifying the Postcolonial State 39

to Quaid’s grave’.61 The reports by the Indian High Commission in

Karachi, though they acknowledged that ‘Jinnah’s grave [had] become
a place of pilgrimage for Muslims far and near’, disputed the number of
people visiting it on a daily basis. Rather, as Indian officials explained,
enthusiasm was being ‘kept alive by occasional free bus rides to the grave
side, [and] by photographers being arranged to be in attendance when
any one of importance visits the grave side to lay a wreath’. These
photographs were then duly published in newspapers such as Dawn,
giving visitors ‘the satisfaction of not only seeing themselves … but also
offering proof of their loyalty to the State’.62
What the Indian High Commission, however, could confirm was the
speed with which the land around the grave was cleared and levelled as
part of the Pakistan government’s plan to build a ‘mosque, a replica of
the Jumma Masjid in Delhi, an exquisite mausoleum over Jinnah’s grave,
a Dar-ul-Ulum [religious seminary] and an institute of technology’ on
the site. But while these schemes were given top priority, apparently
placing other plans to build a new site for the federal headquarters in
the vicinity of Karachi and a diplomatic colony into “‘cold storage’, the
initial response from the public in terms of donating funds was described
as disappointing:
[Syed Hashim] Raza, Administrator of Karachi called a public meeting in which
the non-Muslims outnumbered the Muslims and the Parsis outnumbered the
non-Muslims. It was given out that an announcement would be made as soon as
Rs 10 lakhs had been collected. [But] as no announcement has so far been made,
it may be presumed that even this paltry sum is not yet forthcoming.63
All the same, for local politicians, foreign dignitaries and ordinary
citizens, the act of visiting the final resting place of the country’s
‘founding father’ acquired enormous symbolic importance, with official
and military ceremonies taking place there on special occasions. The first
official act of the newly installed bishop of Karachi, for instance, was to
visit Jinnah’s grave in October 1948 to offer prayers and blessings.64 As
one visitor in 1950 commented in his private diary, there was a ‘huge
crowd there all the time, particularly on Thursday. His grave has become
a place of pilgrimage. I saw a few people reading the Quran. They have

61
‘No Bakr Id Joy This Year’, Dawn, 16 October 1948.
62
M. K. Kirpalani, Deputy High Commissioner for India in Pakistan, ‘Fortnightly Report
for second half of September 1948’, 4 October 1948’, MEA/2-1, 48 – Pak I (Vol. I) NAI.
63 64
Ibid. Dawn, 7 October 1948.
40 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan

turned it into a saint’s shrine. At one stage there was even qawwali. But
the Government of Pakistan has banned that’.65
In August 1949, with the first anniversary of Jinnah’s death fast
approaching, the authorities had to decide how the occasion was to be
marked. People were requested ‘to pay homage to the Father of the
Nation and the Founder of the State’ by participating in the largest
possible number at a fateha khawani (condolence prayer meeting) to be
held at his tomb and ‘to bring with them their own copy of the Holy
Quran for recitation’. A public meeting was also scheduled for the
evening, to be addressed by Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman, chairman of the
Muslim League, and other prominent personalities.66 While the Quaid-i-
Azam Relief Fund, set up to coordinate the various provincial, central
and private refugee relief agencies, was intended to provide a lasting
legacy of a more practical kind, the Pakistani authorities like their Indian
counterparts took pains to prohibit any unauthorized use of Jinnah’s
name. As reports in the intensely patriotic Karachi newspaper Dawn
explained in 1949, ‘it [had] been observed that the hallowed name of
the Quaid is being exploited by petty shopkeepers in Karachi. This
tendency is objectionable unless official permission is obtained and all
those shops who are using the Quaid-i-Azam’s name without official
permission are given time to stop doing so by the 1st of May 1949’.67
This prohibition proved ineffective, however. Just a few months later,
there were still reports of Jinnah’s face appearing in advertisements for
‘Pak’ and ‘Badshahi’ bidis (cigarettes),68 while in 1950, a disgruntled
Karachi resident complained that
Although the Government have prohibited the use, association and display of
Quaid-i-Azam’s name and photo for purposes of business, advertisements etc., it
is regretted that in actual practice these instructions are deliberately violated.
Sometime ago I happened to see an advertisement in the city about Quaid-i-
Azam Brand Pure Ghee. A medicine ‘Jinnahspirin’ is being openly sold. In
certain cinema houses it has become a practice to display Quaid-i-Azam in
pencil and chalk drawing with incorrect spelling of the leader’s name. It is time
that the authorities took serious view of such practices and punish the offenders.

65
From Auraq-i Paridshan, Jamal Mian’s Sararnameh-i Pakistan, entry for 29 August 1950,
n.p.
66
Office Memo No. 15/12/49 Public, 30 August 1949, Government of Pakistan, Ministry
of the Interior, Home Division National Documentation Centre (hereafter NDC). It was
also announced in 1949 that the government did not propose to hold any celebrations on
Jinnah’s ‘official’ birthday – 25 December – except to allow Pakistani flags to be flown on
all government buildings, see Memo No. 15/11/49, 25 November 1949, Government of
Pakistan, Ministry of the Interior, Home Division NDC.
67
‘Shops Not to Be Named after Quaid-e-Azam’, Dawn, 20 April 1949.
68
Dawn, 30 September 1949.
 Personifying the Postcolonial State 41

We must show due respect to the founder of our State and even if his photo is to
be displayed on the screen it must be one which is officially accepted by the
Government.69

The same point was picked up by newspaper editors who reflected on

the broader misuse of ‘great names’, citing with admiration Gandhi’s
opposition to cigarettes being named after him: as a Dawn editorial
commented,
There has been an increasing tendency … to name business concerns after
Quaid-i-Azam. We can quite see that those who do it do so in order to seek
blessing in their own way, from that great name, and thereby to make their wares
attractive or acceptable to the customer. … It is for the leaders and the Press of
this country to explain this legislation [forbidding misuse of Jinnah’s name] to the
common people. There is much in a name: a great name has to be lived up to and
not to be traded upon.70
In October 1951, following his own assassination, the body of
Pakistan’s first Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan was brought to Karachi
from Rawalpindi and buried close to that of Jinnah, his funeral creating a
second occasion for very public shared grieving on a massive scale:
thousands lined the streets of [the] capital to see his body brought from the
airport. During the morning it lay on the veranda of his home in a casket
heaped high with flowers. Mourners trudged slowly passed it. [In the]
afternoon, 250,000 gathered in the polo fields where the coffin was brought for
a state display before its burial. There it was laid on a gun carriage decked with
flowers and drawn by Pakistan navy men thru [sic] the streets to the burial
place.71
While this outpouring of national grief was more restrained than when
Jinnah had died, the ceremonies associated with Liaquat’s burial in the
days and weeks that followed re-focussed the collective attention of the
country’s citizens on a site that had already become the emblematic
centre of Pakistani national sentiment, and hence the symbolic terrain
on which the state both performed and represented its new identity.72
Meanwhile in India, political advantages for the new regime continued
to be drawn directly from Gandhi’s death anniversaries. This was

69 70 71
Dawn, 26 January 1950. Ibid. Chicago Tribune, 18 October 1951.
72
The early 1950s witnessed lobbying to turn 16 October (the date of Liaquat Ali Khan’s
assassination) into a national Martyrs Day, when Pakistanis could pay homage not just to
the murdered prime minister but to ‘the thousands who gave their lives so that Pakistan
might be created’. However, as one letter to Dawn added, ‘It will not, however, be
sufficient for the Government to just declare it a national holiday. It is the Government’s
duty to see that it is observed in a proper and befitting manner, and I am sure that the
public will co-operate in every way’. See Dawn, n.d. August 1952.
42 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan

particularly evident in the period leading up to India’s first general

elections in 1951–2 with supporters of the prime minister calling for
Nehru to be seen as Gandhi’s ‘heir’. As we will explore in more detail
in later chapters, Nehru derived considerable political mileage from this
association when he confronted Tandon over the presidency of the
Congress Party in 1951. As one national Indian newspaper put it,
following the resignation of Tandon, the more ‘secular’ and ‘Gandhian’
leadership of Nehru suited him for this position: ‘Congress opinion is
agreed that today’s decision of the AICC [All-India Congress
Committee] to entrust Mr Nehru with full-fledged leadership of the
Congress would have a tonic effect on Muslims and other minorities. It
is also held possible that Muslims would join the Congress more readily
and in larger numbers than under the presidentship of Mr. Tandon’.73
However, once the Congress had firmly established itself following its
successes in the first general elections, these kinds of references to
Gandhi’s legacy grew less frequent. Instead, at least in localities like
UP, discussion revolved around a new generation of largely career polit-
icians who no longer felt the need to pay the same degree of ideological
lip service to the Mahatma.74 Similarly, by the mid-1950s, commemor-
ations for Jinnah in Pakistan had become more routine, with instructions
in 1955 – the seventh anniversary of Jinnah’s death – stating that a
condolence prayer meeting (fateha khawani) would be held both at his
mazar (tomb) and at the residence of his sister, Fatima Jinnah. But
provincial governments were given strict orders that while they should
put suitable arrangements in place, no public meetings were to be held
‘under official auspice [sic], nor flags … flown at half-mast’.75

Projecting the New State

When Pakistan and India came into existence on midnight on 14/15
August 1947, as was the case in many other states making the transition
from colonial rule, their political leaders faced enormous mutual chal-
lenges as far as turning what had been a demand for political rights into a
reality. In India, the transition to Independence ought to be viewed as
a medium to long-term process, not least because notions of autonomy
can be traced at least back to the framework under which Congress

73
‘Reactions to Mr. Nehru’s Victory in Congress’, Times of India, 9 September 1951.
74
William Gould, Bureaucracy, Community and Influence in India: Society and the State,
1930s–1960s (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 153–4.
75
‘Death Anniversary of the Quaid-e-Azam in 1955’, Memo No. 15/23/55, 27 August
1955, Government of Pakistan, Ministry of the Interior NDC.
 Projecting the New State 43

governments had held power in eight of British India’s eleven provinces

between 1937 and 1939. The period from the end of the Second World
War, and especially following the elections of the winter of 1945–6, also
signalled that the end of colonial rule was in sight. Yet while Partition
refugees proved to be a consistent focus of public attention after August
1947, there was surprisingly little reflection in UP newspapers on the
possible changes to the lives of most Indians that might have been
brought about by these dramatic events in terms of new or anticipated
democratic rights. Instead, when reflections on the meanings of ‘Inde-
pendence’ did take place, they tended to be explored through the more
murky lens of everyday problems – food supply, political problems,
corruption and shortages. On the Pakistani side of the border, circum-
stances were by their nature more precipitate but also shaped by local
considerations. For all the enthusiasm of those who at the stroke of
midnight had found themselves ‘Pakistanis’, the reality of their new state
meant very little to most people now living within its newly drawn-up
frontiers. Despite the public celebrations that took place in Karachi to
signal the official British handover, it was said that the vast majority of its
new citizens ‘scarcely realised that Pakistan had really come about’.76
‘Pakistan’ had after all been a rallying cry, envisaged – towards the later
stages of the struggle to end British rule – first and foremost as a place
that was not ‘India’. Jinnah, when he had inaugurated Pakistan’s separate
Constituent Assembly on 11 August, referred to the creation of Pakistan
as a ‘supreme moment’, and ‘the fulfilment of the destiny of the Muslim
nation’. But as contemporaries astutely recalled, while Independence
celebrations were ‘carried off with very scanty means and not in as perfect
a manner as at Delhi … that never struck one as incongruous as it was
improvised, Pakistan itself was being improvised’.77
Almost overnight, anything and everything that could be was re-
labelled as ‘Pakistan’ or ‘Pakistani’: for many people there, just to hear
the name of their country reportedly became a ‘source of pride’.78 From
ministries to refugee rehabilitation boards to the railway, ‘Pakistan’ was
added to their official designation. In due course, firms were advised to
brand their products ‘Made in Pakistan’, so as to encourage ‘patriotic’

76
Comment by Wilfred Russell, cited in T. Royle, The Last Days of the Raj (London:
Michael Joseph, 1989), pp. 171–2.
77
Sahebzada Yaqub Khan, Delhi, 15 March 1997, quoted in Andrew Whitehead, Oral
Archive: India: A People Partitioned (London: School of Oriental and African Studies,
1997, 2000), cited by Khan, ‘The Ending of an Empire: From Imagined Communities
to Nation States in India and Pakistan’, The Round Table 97, 398 (2008), p. 47, http://
dx.doi.org/10.1080/00358530802327845 (accessed December 2018).
78
Keith Callard, Pakistan: A Political Study (London: Allen & Unwin, 1958), p. 270.
44 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan

Pakistanis not to confuse them with foreign (Indian?) manufactures.

And, day in and day out, the instruction to ‘Patronise Pakistani Products’
reverberated from public platforms and government speeches.79 Acts as
mundane as posting a letter turned into a way of projecting the same
message. From October 1947, this required the use of former British
India stamps overprinted with the word ‘Pakistan’, and franked with the
slogan ‘Pakistan zindabad’ (Long Live Pakistan). It was not until July
1948 that the Pakistani authorities issued the country’s first set of postal
stamps. Produced to celebrate the first anniversary of Independence,80
none of the four stamps, however, contained images that were directly
connected with the eastern – Bengali – wing of the country: instead three
depicted buildings in West Pakistan81 while the fourth (apparently
approved by Jinnah himself ) was based on the crescent and star motif
made familiar by the League’s own flag, itself the template for Pakistan’s
national emblem (see Figure 1.4).82
India’s own postal stamps showed an equal level of concern about
territory and borders, especially vis-à-vis Pakistan. India’s territorial
claim to Kashmir was included on the 1950s’ stamps depicting the map
of India, where the whole province was included in cartographic repre-
sentations, including the part beyond the 1948 ceasefire line.83 India was
less careful in the representation of its north-eastern boundaries, where,
despite in effect ‘annexing’ Bhutan on maps from this time, it was
suggested that 31,000 square miles of territory disputed with China lay
‘outside’ India. But Portuguese India, not absorbed within the Union
until 1961, was incorporated in the maps of India on postage stamps in
the 1950s.84

79
Dawn, January 1950.
80
These were printed in London because Pakistan still lacked the necessary presses,
although there was confusion over what exactly was being celebrated as the date for
Pakistani independence was given on these stamps as 15 (rather than 14) August 1947.
81
The First Constituent Assembly Building in Karachi (formerly the Sindh Legislative
Assembly), the entrance to Karachi airport, and the Lahore Fort gateway.
82
In March 1948, it had been announced that the standstill agreement on postal
arrangements would come to an end on the last day of that month. It was reported
locally that India had proposed that ordinary mail between the two countries should be
regarded as foreign mail, and hence that foreign rates should be charged instead of the
existing internal rates. This would mean more than doubling the cost of ordinary letters
as well as airmail rates. According to press reports, the Pakistan authorities wished to
maintain the rates as the existing level but ‘will, of course, have to follow India’s lead’.
See UKHC, Karachi, Opdom 26, 25–31 March 1948, IOR L/WS/1/1599 BL.
83
By the late 1950s, India had made it illegal to import books with any maps that did not
show Kashmir as part of India.
84
Dudley Stamp, ‘Philatelie Cartography: A Critical Study of Maps on Stamps with
Special Reference to the Commonwealth’, Geography 51, 3 (July 1966), pp. 192–4.
 Projecting the New State 45

Figure 1.4 Muslim League National Guards with the Pakistani flag,
Karachi, December 1947.
Photo by Margaret Bourke-White/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

As far as currency was concerned, Pakistanis initially carried on using

British India bank notes and coins until April 1948, when the Reserve
Bank of India issued currency for use exclusively within Pakistan (that is,
without the possibility of redemption in India). Still printed by the India
Security Press in Nasik (in what was then the Indian state of Bombay),
the new banknotes were produced from Indian plates now engraved
(rather than overprinted) with ‘GOVERNMENT OF PAKISTAN’ in
English and its Urdu translation Hukumat-i-Pakistan added at the top
and bottom on the front only (see Figure 1.5).85 This move, however,
unsurprisingly created considerable confusion at first, and so official

85
The signatures on these bank notes apparently remained those of Indian banking and
finance officials.
46 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan

Figure 1.5 A five-rupee currency note presented to M. A. Jinnah by the

Ministry of Finance, 1 April 1948. Issued by the Reserve Bank of India,
the note, stamped with Government of Pakistan (Hukumat-i Pakistan),
operated as legal tender in the new state.

statements were needed to clarify that while the new bank notes were
legal tender only in Pakistan, Government of India notes would continue
to circulate for the foreseeable future.86 Moreover, Pakistani and Indian
rupees remained interchangeable up to 1949, when the two currencies
finally went their separate ways after India but not Pakistan devalued its

86
UKHC, Karachi, Opdom 26, 25–31 March 1948, IOR L/WS/1/1599 BL.
 Projecting the New State 47

rupee and introduced new currency notes,87 a move that contemporaries

regarded as an opportunity for the country to pursue its own best inter-
ests regarding its currency status even if, in the short term, the shortage of
Pakistani coins in circulation created local difficulties.88
One of the interesting inversions for India following Independence,
and a topic that generated much media comment, was the role of admin-
istrative officers and policemen who had served the colonial regime and
their ‘transition’ to a new democratic context. This changeover was
critically important for all citizens given the fact that not only was the
local bureaucrat or police officer the tangible face of the new ‘state’ but
also one that had become especially palpable in the light of food and civil
supply problems through the war years and thereafter. In early January
1948, the UP Governor Sarojini Naidu declared at the annual police
parade at Lucknow that those who had fought for the freedom of
the country were no longer simply ‘badmashes’ (criminals) but rather
badmashes ‘in service of the country’, whose duty was now to ‘work as
protectors of the people’.89 There were plenty of general articles on the
new spirit of service that ought to imbue the public servants’ relations to
the people.90 In similar fashion, just over a week later, G. B. Pant, chief
minister of the state (see Figure 1.6), addressed a conference of police-
men in the city of Kanpur. In his speech he declared that ‘The days when
we detested the red turbans are over’. Pant proceeded to highlight the
urgent need to fight bribery and corruption, instructing policemen to
behave towards the people in the way that they would expect their fellow
officers to behave with their own kinsmen elsewhere in the country: as
he reminded them, ‘Today, you are not merely policemen, but citizens of
a free nation’.91
Nevertheless, there were plenty of instances, in UP at least,
when complaints swiftly arose about the ‘failed’ administration of newly
democratic India, which in the eyes of its critics had not fully made the

87
In February 1949 new currency notes were introduced. Then in June 1949, pure nickel
one-rupee Indian coins ceased to be legal tender in Pakistan; see UKHC, Karachi,
Opdom 23, 3–9 June 1949, IOR L/WS/11600 BL.
88
Dawn, 23 September 1949. As one press report pointed out, following Pakistan’s
decision not to devalue its rupee, coins of all value bearing pre-Partition stamps in the
Sindh district of Badin were now being refused, with knock-on problems for trade thanks
to the insufficiency of Pakistan-minted alternatives. See Dawn, 28 September 1949.
89
‘Sarkar Aur Janta khitaab police-parade mein strimati Naidu ka Bhashan’, Aaj, 7 January
1948; ‘Work as Protectors of the People: Governor’s Advice to the Police’, National
Herald, 6 January 1948.
90
‘Sarkar Aur Sevak’, Aaj, 9 April 1948.
91
‘“Imbibe Missionary Spirit”: Premier Pant’s Plea to Cawnpore Policemen’, National
Herald, 17 January 1948.
48 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan

Figure 1.6 Govind Ballabh Pant, first premier/chief minister of UP.

Photo by James Burke/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

transition away from colonial governance. For instance, in the ‘Reader’s

Forum’ of Lucknow’s National Herald newspaper, one G. Misra com-
mented that the ‘dawn of freedom’ had been accompanied by a new
menace in the district of Gorakhpur in the eastern part of UP – namely,
the interaction between official and non-official. Misra gave the case of a
particular magistrate, who was allegedly ‘holding jurisdiction in many
different areas’ beyond his formal powers. ‘These power hungry adminis-
trators’, Misra concluded, ‘are doing things which discredit the people’s
government and the Congress’.92 As we will see in later chapters, the
‘reconstruction’ of the state administration to accommodate, in particu-
lar, the new demands of welfare, local government, land redistribution
(zamindari abolition) and supply of goods often stimulated public debate
about the role of minorities, migrants and refugees as far as public
employment was concerned.
Unlike independent India that inherited the former headquarters of
colonial power – New Delhi – together with a range of ready-made
‘national’ institutions already in place, the politicians and bureaucrats

92
‘Reader’s Forum’, National Herald, 8 January 1948.
 Projecting the New State 49

now running Pakistan faced the challenge of creating a whole set of new
administrative structures. On the one hand, this infrastructure itself had
to embody the ‘state’; on the other hand, it was through this framework
that the ‘state’ would have to operate, perform and reproduce itself on a
day-to-day basis. At the federal level, a raft of replacement national
institutions – ministries, commissions, committees – needed to be put
in place, and quickly. Comparable trials and tribulations in terms of
reconfiguring everyday administrative structures applied at the provincial
level as well. Pakistan’s biggest provinces (in terms of population) – East
Bengal and West Punjab – had been parts of two larger units, namely
united Bengal and the Punjab, themselves now divided in two. Hence, here
too the local administration required extensive re-building. In the case of
Sindh, though territorially unaffected by Partition, a large proportion of the
province’s non-Muslim government officials left for India in the months
following Independence. And as was the case with India, the place of
Princely States and tribal areas had yet to be resolved. It was much the
same for municipalities and district boards, with their day-to-day operations
disrupted by migration and displacement. Other explicitly ‘national’ bodies
to be set up included a State Bank – regarded by the press as a necessary
symbol of statehood – opened in Karachi on 1 July 1948 by Jinnah, who
took the opportunity to call Pakistan’s banking arrangements to be separ-
ated from those of India and also to conduct its banking in accordance with
so-called Islamic ideals.93 Meanwhile, against the backdrop of growing
tension with India over Kashmir in 1948, the authorities established a
Pakistan National Guard with the ambitious objective of training two
million civilians, comprising both women and men, in the use of arms.94
In most of India, and particularly in locations such as UP, the Indian
state was very closely associated with the principal vehicle of anti-colonial
protest, namely the Congress that following Independence transformed
itself from an all-embracing national movement into a political party.
This association was, at one level, a by-product of colonial power itself:
law and order and revenue collection as the principal logics of the
colonial system were presided over and controlled by political adminis-
trators,95 and at least in terms of party organization the Congress

93
Branch offices of the new State Bank of Pakistan were opened in Lahore and Dacca; see
UKHC, Karachi, Opdom 54, 1–7 July 1948, IOR L/WS/1/1599 BL.
94
At a ceremonial parade of the PNG held in Karachi in May 1948, the turnout of the men’s
battalions was ‘not impressive’: the women, in contrast, were ‘smart and keen, and attracted
admiring and envious comment from their less active sisters among the spectators’. See
UKHC, Karachi, Opdom 40, 13–19 May 1948, IOR L/WS/1/1599 BL.
95
For a sense of how this worked through district administration, see David Potter, India’s
Political Administrators 1919–1983 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
50 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan

necessarily mapped onto much of the same jurisdiction as had existed in

the bureaucratic apparatus in the interwar period. Perhaps it was not so
strange that power exercised locally involved a bureaucratic-political
nexus in which Congress leaders exercised significant authority over
local administrators. In effect, the Congress Party equalled the ‘state’ in
the eyes of much of the population.96 By way of parallel processes in
Pakistan, there were complications generated by the fact that the state
there, at least in period immediately following Independence, tended to
be closely identified with another dominant political party, the Muslim
League. To all intents and purposes, state and party were regarded by
many Pakistanis (whether they liked it or not) as synonymous, and
distinctions between the two extremely were blurred: in the words of
Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya, the League ‘was expected to play
a role similar to that of the Indian National Congress in India by provid-
ing the leadership and the organizational machinery to ensure and facili-
tate mass participation in the political structure’.97 League politicians
automatically assumed key roles both at the centre and in the provinces,
dominating the federal Cabinet in Karachi, as well as providing a major-
ity of the members of the Constituent Assembly also located in that city.
Ministers and party officials combined their efforts to reinvigorate the
League and engender ‘solidarity and discipline in its ranks’.98
Under these circumstances, it was often hard in practice, whether in
India or in Pakistan, to separate the state in terms of its administrative
functions from those interests who claimed to represent it politically. We
see this happening in UP, even though government servant rules were set
up with the apparent aim of ensuring ‘complete political neutrality’ for
government servants.99 As we will explore in later chapters, public scan-
dal frequently revolved around the misuse of political patronage towards
civil servants and police officers, and the use of bureaucratic transfer. In
Pakistan, corresponding patterns were evident, even after a ban on
ministers holding party offices was included in the Constitution of the
All-Pakistan Muslim League at the time of its formal establishment in
February 1948.100 Attempts to distinguish between the two were made

96
For an exploration of how this worked in more detail, see Gould, Bureaucracy,
Community and Influence, chapter 6.
97
Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London:
Routledge, 2000), p. 204.
98
UKHC, Karachi, Opdom 28, 1–7 April 1948, IOR L/WS/1/1599 BL.
99
These were Rules 18, 19 and 20 of the Government Servant Conduct Rules. See
Ministry of Home Affairs, File No. 25/59/52 – Ests. (A) NAI.
100
This prohibition was later temporarily lifted in October 1950, only to be subsequently
re-imposed.
 Projecting the New State 51

trickier still by the fact that these same politicians often framed their
rhetoric as if they were talking on behalf of the state, rather than the party
to which they belonged. Leading Muslim Leaguer and ‘Father of the
Nation’ – Jinnah – was transformed overnight into the state’s supreme
representative when he assumed the responsibilities of governor general
at Independence, and then proceeded to juggle these duties alongside
those of the head of the government, leader of the Muslim League and
the office of president of the Constituent Assembly.
This high-level process of projecting the independent state often
hinged on controlling information flows between India and Pakistan,
whose relationship was poor from the start. In January 1948, the UP
government issued a notification under the Maintenance of Public
Order (Temporary) Act forbidding newspapers there from publishing
any news item taken directly from Radio Pakistan in so far as these
related to Kashmir, political matters or armed conflict.101 To a great
extent though, Radio Pakistan’s reach was still very limited, prompting
Pakistani politicians at federal and provincial level repeatedly to tour
the country in person, in attempts to project the authority of the new
state that they now represented as well as their own political interests.
In April 1948, for instance, Jinnah – not long after his controversial visit
to East Bengal where he drew criticism for his support for Urdu as
the country’s sole national language despite a majority of its citizens
speaking Bengali – undertook a ‘full and energetic’ tour of the NWFP.
There his speeches sought to hammer home the message that the ‘anti-
government’ attitude that had so recently helped to remove a foreign
(colonial) administration now needed to be replaced by discipline and a
constructive approach towards solving Pakistan’s social and economic
problems.102 Unity and discipline, he emphasized, were required ‘if the
difficult task of building Pakistan into [a] solid state was to succeed’. At
a joint tribal jirga held against the backdrop of growing tension with
India over disputed Kashmir, Jinnah assured assembled Pashtun chiefs
that Pakistan, while not wishing to interfere with the internal freedom of
their so-called tribes, would provide all possible assistance in educa-
tional, social and economic development: in return, he asked for tribal
loyalty and assistance in national defence. The local press headlined
the tour as a triumphal success, but other contemporaries reported a
‘general sense of disappointment, in part thanks to excessive security
restrictions and [also] partly to Jinnah’s failure to appeal to rugged

101
‘UP Ban on Publication of Pakistan Radio Reports’, National Herald, 7 January 1948.
102
UKHC, Karachi, Opdom 29, 8–14 April 1948, IOR L/WS/1/1599 BL.
52 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan

Pathan humour – he … usually spoke in English and kept at a distance

from crowds’.103
Tours and ceremonial occasions shaped by various party political
agenda took place at a local (state or provincial) level too. This has been
explored at the level of high state ceremony in UP’s main Congress-led
projections of the nation, around flags, Independence Day and the
politics of historical reconstruction and renaming.104 However, the
translation of some of these ideas at local-level perceptions of state power
moved beyond the significance of region itself. In the UP city of
Allahabad in January 1948, Acharya Jugal Kishore championed the
Congress-linked volunteer movement, the Seva Dal, as an organization
dedicated to service, self-sacrifice, simplicity, the promotion of national
unity and improving the fitness and health of the Indian people through
physical culture and training. In times of emergency, the idea was that
the Seva Dal would act as a peace and relief brigade, as well as a ‘School
of Citizenship’.105 In the Tehri district in the north-west of UP, a public
meeting was held on 17 January 1948 to commemorate what local
politicians described as ‘Deliverance Day’. This anniversary marked the
local taking over of law and order by the UP state government and was
coordinated by a political-administrative combination of the veteran
Indian Civil Service man B. D. Sanwal and Mahabir Tyagi, Congress
politician and member of the UP Legislative Assembly for Dehradun. At
the gathering in front of Tehri Jail, Tyagi made a speech saying that the
officers of the UP government had come to ‘serve the people who were
now free’. The provincial government, he reported, had announced
compensation to political sufferers, the refund of collective fines imposed
on the people of the region, the release of political prisoners and freedom
of speech and the press.106
In the Pakistani province of Sindh, in March 1948, equivalent grand-
standing events were planned and delivered. The president of the Sindh
Provincial Muslim League Yusuf Haroon, accompanied by Manzar
Alam, the president of the States Muslim League who had migrated to
the province from India, undertook the first visit since Independence by
League office holders to some of Lower Sindh’s smaller urban centres,
including Thatta, Hyderabad and Tando Allahyar. Their official aim was

103
UKHC, Karachi, Opdom 31, 15–21 April 1948, IOR L/WS/1599 BL.
104
Gyanesh Kudaisya, Region, Nation, “Heartland”: Uttar Pradesh in India’s Body Politic
(New Delhi: Sage, 2006), pp. 342–59.
105
‘Congress Seva Dal Not a Military Body: Social Service the Goal, Says Jugal Kishore’,
National Herald, 23 January 1948.
106
‘Deliverance Day Observed in Tehri: People Welcome UP Govt Officers’, National
Herald, 21 January 1948.
 Projecting the New State 53

to ‘create an awakening among the masses for the reorganization of the

Pakistan Muslim League on a representative basis’, but the majority of
Haroon’s time was taken up with addressing complaints about shortages
of necessary goods and accusations of corruption in the administration.
Even shrouds were apparently difficult to obtain, triggering the sugges-
tion that the authorities should at least provide cloth for the dead even if
they could not do so for the living. As one newspaper correspondent
asked, ‘Where is the utopia you promised us after the establishment of
Pakistan? We have won our independence but can you honestly say that
this has made any difference [to] the lot of the common man?’107
For many Pakistanis, Jinnah more than anyone or anything else – as
reactions to his death discussed above have suggested – symbolized
the new state: his rhetoric along with his physical being were both consti-
tutive and representative of Pakistani identity, and hence Pakistan
itself. Indeed, Jinnah’s way with words equipped those running the new
state with a rich repository of useful nation- and state-building resources.
By the early 1950s, the authorities had launched an official Pakistani
emblem that featured Jinnah’s most famous saying. Green in colour, and
incorporating a crescent and a star, this symbolic shorthand for the state
signified Pakistan’s ideological foundation – Islam – while its shield,
divided into quarters and showing the country’s major crops at this
time – cotton, wheat, tea and jute – pointed to the agricultural base of its
economy. The surrounding floral wreath, which alluded to traditional
Mughal art forms, emphasized Pakistan’s Indo-Muslim cultural
heritage. Finally, the scroll supporting the shield contained three Urdu
words – – that read (from right to left) ‘iman-ittihad-nazm’.
Translated as ‘Faith, Unity, Discipline’ – virtues invoked by Jinnah both
before and after Independence – these were turned into Pakistan’s official
guiding principles, which, emblazoned on hillsides and public monu-
ments, came to acquire pride of place alongside Jinnah’s own portrait as a
physical embodiment of Pakistan’s identity and political reality. While
their exact ordering has triggered an ongoing debate, in practice, Jinnah
himself prioritized them differently in different speeches. In 1950, a letter
writer in Dawn suggested that, echoing the Statue of Liberty in New York,
‘the Pakistan Government should construct in memory of our beloved
Quaid-i-Azam, a huge structure on the Oyster Rocks in Karachi harbour,
just off Clifton, visible miles away to the incoming ships and the planes as
well. If possible the words “Unity, Faith and Discipline” may be inscribed
on it, and brilliantly lighted at night’.108

107
Dawn, 23 March 1948.
108
UKHC, Karachi, Opdom 51, 24–30 June 1948, IOR L/WS/1/1599 BL.
54 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan

Both India and Pakistan quickly produced national flags, either as

adaptations of older ones or largely new, inspired by those of the parties
that spearheaded the recent struggles for Independence. India’s was
based on the Congress’s Swaraj flag, but with the spinning wheel
replaced by the Ashoka Chakra or eternal wheel of law. The gradual
production of this flag linked back to the 1931 Karachi Congress, which
had passed a resolution on the flag, and the requirement for it to be
‘officially acceptable’ to the Congress. It was from this point that the
issue of the ‘communal’ significance of its colours was perhaps most
strongly and openly debated, with potential designs that were totally
saffron eventually being abandoned for the tricolour: white representing
Christian communities, green representing Muslims and saffron Hindus.
The flag encapsulated debates about the material and symbolic role of
Gandhi’s constructive nationalism: In 1931, it had been made of home-
spun cloth, with an image of the spinning wheel placed at the centre. By
the time of Independence, the full image of a spinning wheel had been
replaced by a martial sign of the conquering warriors of Ashoka – the
Dharma Chakra – the wheel of cosmic order. When this replacement
was proposed in July and August 1947, Gandhi expressed a sense of
disappointment and concern that the spinning wheel had been lost.109
However, typically he took the opportunity at a prayer meeting to turn his
dismay into the positive point that ‘the country should have only one flag
and everyone should salute it’. For Gandhi, the significance of the flag
also surpassed simple questions of demographic symbolism and denoted
ideas of belonging for minorities, particularly Muslims: before Independ-
ence, it had made him ‘very happy to hear that in the Constituent
Assembly both Choudhry Khaliquzzaman110 and Mohammad Sadul-
lah111 saluted the flag and declared that they would be loyal to the
National Flag. If they mean it, it is a good sign’.112 And just before
Independence, Pakistan’s incoming government adopted a flag very
similar to that used by Muslim League, which had itself drawn inspir-
ation from flags associated with the Sultanate of Delhi, the Mughal

109
See, for instance, his piece in Harijanbandhu, 3 August 1947, reproduced in Gandhi’s
Collected Works (hereafter GCW), Vol. 96, pp. 151–3.
110
Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman (1889–1973), a prominent Muslim League leader from UP,
remained in India until November 1947 when he migrated to Pakistan, succeeding
Jinnah as president of the Muslim League in 1948.
111
Muhammed Saadulah (1885–1955) was the prime minister of Assam prior to
Independence. In 1940 he was a member of the Muslim League Executive
Committee that met in March at Lahore to draft the Lahore or ‘Pakistan Resolution’.
He was elected to the Constituent Assembly of India in 1947 and later became a
member of its Drafting Committee. He did not migrate to Pakistan.
112
‘Speech at a Prayer Meeting’, New Delhi, 22 July 1947, GCW, Vol. 96, p. 113.
 Projecting the New State 55

Empire and the Ottoman Empire, with the green representing Islam and
the country’s Muslim majority while its white stripe symbolized religious
minorities and minority religions. In the centre, the crescent and star –
traditional symbols associated with Islam – denoted progress and light
respectively.
National anthems took longer to be approved. With the handover of
power looming, government officials in Bombay, for instance, had
requested confirmation regarding what tune to play on 15 August
1947. On 11 August, they received the following reply: ‘In connection
with the celebrations of the “Independence Day”, all collectors are
informed that “God Save the King” should not be played or sung on
the 15th August [but] there will no objection to “Vande Mataram”113
being played or sung if so desired’. Though the chief secretary to the
Political and Services Department of the Government of Bombay prom-
ised that ‘orders regarding the new national anthem [would] be issued in
due course’, it took until January 1950 before India’s official choice –
Jana Gana Mana – was adopted by the Constituent Assembly. Indeed, it
is not clear what was sung officially at the intervening Independence Day
celebrations of 1947–49. Pakistan faced its own musical headache when
it came to finalizing its own national song. At the direct invitation of
Jinnah, a first set of words was penned in 1947 by Jagannath Azad, a
Punjabi Hindu, Urdu poet and scholar of Iqbal’s poetry.114 Interviewed
much later (in 2004), Azad recalled the circumstances under which he
had been asked to write Pakistan’s national anthem:
In August 1947, when mayhem had struck the whole subcontinent, I was in
Lahore working in a literary newspaper. All my relatives had left for India and for
me to think of leaving Lahore was painful. My Muslim friends requested me to
stay. On August 9, 1947, there was a message from Jinnah Sahib through one of
my friends at Radio Pakistan Lahore. He told me ‘Quaid-i-Azam wants you to
write a national anthem for Pakistan’ … I asked my friends why Jinnah Sahib
wanted me to write the anthem. They confided in me that ‘the Quaid wanted the
anthem to be written by an Urdu-knowing Hindu’.115

113
Written as a poem by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in 1875, and later composed as
a song by Rabindranath Tagore, Bande Mataram (‘Mother I bow to thee’) was adopted
as India’s national song in January 1950, its first two verses having been adopted as the
National Song of India by the Congress Working Committee in October 1937.
114
Shortly after writing the national anthem, Azad (1918–2004) migrated to India, where
from 1977 to 1980 he was professor of Urdu and head of the Urdu Department at the
University of Jammu.
115
See http://defenceforumindia.com/forum/threads/debate-over-hindu-writing-paks-1st-
anthem-continues.5636/ (accessed December 2018). See also Raza Rumi, Delhi by
Heart: Impressions of a Pakistani Traveller (New Delhi: Harper Collins India, 2013) for
another version of this comment by Azad shortly before his death.
56 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan

In December 1948, in the wake of Jinnah’s death, for reasons that are not
clear other than the Pakistani authorities’ likely desire for something
written by a Muslim,116 a search was started for a replacement anthem,
and a National Anthem Committee was set up, comprising politicians,
poets and musicians and initially chaired by the Information Secretary.
Progress, however, proved to be slow. Following the first foreign head of
state visit (by President Sukarno of Indonesia) in January 1950, when
there had been nothing available to be played, renewed urgency was
attached to the search. Members of the public now started to worry
about Pakistan’s embarrassing lack of an anthem. As one letter writer
to Dawn pointed out: ‘We want to sing our National Anthem full-
throated and we – men, women and children – would like to stand-to-
attention when its tune is played by our military band’.117 Others agreed:
The National Anthem of a great country always represents the virility, ambition
and spiritual urge of its people. After our religion it is one single factor which is
capable of reinforcing our morale even in the worst circumstances. It can also be
used to discipline our people whether they are students or workers in field or
factory. It is a pity that although this is the third year of our existence the
authorities have not so far been able to release the tune and the wordings of our
National Anthem.118
In 1950, the Committee eventually gave the go-ahead for music by
Ahmed G. Chagla (approved the previous year) to be performed during
a state visit by the Shah of Iran in March, and then the following August
the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting officially approved
new lyrics – written by the well-known poet Hafeez Jullundhri and
chosen from over 700 submissions – with the complete anthem broadcast
publicly for the first time on Radio Pakistan that month.119
Pakistan, like India and other states that had won their freedom from
colonial rule, evidently needed to remind its citizens that they belonged
to a qualitatively different kind of political arrangement than had existed
in the past. National days, parallel to those devised in India, represented
one relatively straightforward way of getting this message across. Hence,

116
It is likely the fact that Azad had migrated to India where he initially became a
government official was an additional factor. In 1948 Azad joined the Government of
India’s Ministry of Labour as editor of Employment News. A few months later he was
appointed as assistant editor (Urdu) with the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting’s
Publications Division.
117 118
Dawn, 14 June 1950. Dawn, 17 June 1950.
119
Suroosh Irfani, ‘Pakistan: Reclaiming the Founding Moment’, Viewpoints Special Edition:
The Islamization of Pakistan, 1979–2009 (Middle East Institute: Washington, DC, 2009),
p. 15, https://www.mei.edu/sites/default/files/publications/2009.07.Islamization%20of%
20Pakistan.pdf (accessed December 2018).
 Projecting the New State 57

14 August – Pakistan’s Independence Day – became a key date in

the annual calendar, when politicians and public were encouraged to
celebrate the anniversary of Pakistan’s creation. In addition, 23 March –
Pakistan Day – conveniently marked both the passing of the 1940 Lahore
(or ‘Pakistan’) Resolution and later when the first Constitution came into
effect in 1956. Jinnah’s official birthday – 25 December – was turned into
a public holiday, as, from 1949 onwards, was the annual commemor-
ation of his death (11 September). On these state occasions, politicians at
national and provincial level issued suitably stirring messages via official
press releases and through the media, with Radio Pakistan playing an
important role as its reach expanded over the course of the 1950s.
Though Jinnah was too unwell to speak directly to crowds gathered in
Karachi to celebrate Independence Day in August 1948, his words of
patriotic encouragement were relayed to by Liaquat Ali Khan, and then
dominated newspaper headlines the following day:120 as Jinnah
reminded Pakistan’s new citizens, the establishment of the country was
‘a fact of which there is no parallel in the history of the world. It is one of
the largest Muslim States …, and it is destined to play its magnificent
part year after year, as we go on, provided we serve Pakistan honestly,
earnestly and selflessly’.121
But despite the specific rhetoric involved, Pakistan’s first anniversary
celebrations were very like those taking place in India a day later, though
perhaps rather more clearly focussed on military technology – a military
tattoo, and a fly-by which dropped leaflets on the crowd (also officially
and conveniently estimated at 200,000), followed the official summaries
of the past year. Speeches focussed much more markedly on the adversity
facing Pakistan from ‘enemies’ (viz. India), and the main reference to
Pakistan’s future related to the establishment of a government operating
‘on Islamic principles’ of equality, fraternity and social justice.122 With
tension mounting over India’s policy towards the Princely State of
Hyderabad (Deccan), Pakistani newspapers reported on Liaquat’s refer-
ence to how enemies had ‘conspired to paralyze the new state and how
Pakistan had bravely weathered the storm’, on the existence of a ‘Sikh

120
Dawn, 15 August 1948.
121
Ibid. For more discussion of the early role played by the All Pakistan History
Conference. in helping the Pakistani state to shape a historical narrative that could
strengthen the argument for a distinct Muslim identity after Partition, see Ali Usman
Qasmi, ‘A Master Narrative for the History of Pakistan: Tracing the origins of an
ideological agenda’, Modern Asian Studies, doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/
S0026749X17000427, Published online: 18 October 2018.
122
R. R. Burnett, Acting High Commission to Pakistan, Despatch 223, 18 August 1948,
DO 133/106 UKNA.
58 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan

conspiracy’, the alleged conspiracy to destroy important papers and

records, and the ‘presence of a certain element whose cult is to spread
discord’.123
According to contemporary observers, with little visible progress in
terms of reorganizing the city’s administration, the Karachi authorities
found themselves with their ‘hands full’ when it came to mounting the
first anniversary celebrations: ‘The much heralded Refugee Rehabilita-
tion Finance Corporation so far appear[ed] to have achieved nothing at
all’, as one observer commented.124 But refugee welfare remained a
dominant theme on these state occasions, exploited by official rhetoric
as well as challenged by the government’s critics. Time and again, the
Pakistan government scheduled its release of information on refugee
rehabilitation to coincide with the anniversary of Independence, taking
the opportunity to outline the progress that it claimed was being made
together with ambitious future projects intended to address any continu-
ing problems.125 In his 1953 Independence Day speech, Prime Minister
Mohammad Ali Bogra announced a scheme for the resettlement of some
43,000 refugee families in the federal capital, and appealed for public
donations to help with the costs involved.126
It was not just anniversaries of key moments in the creation of Pakistan
that offered opportunities to enact and, in the process, reinforce the
official identity of the new state. While members of Pakistan’s Constitu-
ent Assembly were finding it extremely hard to agree on what a ‘Muslim
state’ would actually mean in practice, the religious calendar provided
additional collective occasions for the authorities to exploit. In 1948,
Liaquat and his colleagues were ‘lavish’ in their exhortation to the public
to observe the month of fasting in the manner ‘befitting the largest State
of Islam’.127 In the run-up to Ramadan (the Muslim month of fasting)
that year, the prime minister took the step of issuing an official injunction

123
Dawn, 15 August 1948.
124
UKHC, Karachi, Opdom 69, 29 July–5 August 1948, IOR L/WS/1/1599 BL. The
Refugee Rehabilitation Finance Corporation (RRFC) was set up in March 1948 for
the specific purpose of resettling refugees by advancing loans to them for various
purposes. It was authorized ‘to grant loans to refugee shopkeepers, cottage industry
workers, artisans, agriculturalists, whether working individually or with a cooperative
society or a company formed for that purpose’. It could also grant loans to provincial
governments ‘for undertaking cooperative schemes for refugee rehabilitation’. In 1953,
it had a working capital of thirty million rupees subscribed by the Pakistan Government.
See US Embassy, Despatch 976, ‘The Refugee Problem in Pakistan’, 28 April 1953,
890D.411/4-2853 United States National Archive (hereafter USNA).
125
‘Refugee Rehabilitation’, US Despatch 67, 3 August 1954, 890d.411/8-354 USNA.
126
UKHC Review of Events in Sind, Karachi and Baluchistan, No. 17, 11–24 August
1950, DO 35/5300 UKNA.
127
UKHC, Karachi, Opdom 53, 1–7 July 1948, IOR L/WS/1/1599 BL.
 Projecting the New State 59

to Muslims to observe the fast in practice as well as in spirit: a move that

caused a British observer to comment cynically that ‘this Islamic fervour
on the part of Pakistan officials who, privately, and in some cases publicly
also, are but moderate observers of the Quranic injunctions, is probably
designed to steal the thunder of the Mullahs’.128 The state authorities
also made use of religious festivals – in particular Eid ul-Fitr at the end of
Ramadan and Eid ul-Azha (that marked an important stage in the annual
Hajj) – to deliver public messages about Pakistan’s identity as well as its
progress, whether past, present or future. In August 1947, shortly after
Independence, Jinnah used the occasion of Pakistan’s first Eid celebra-
tions to remind its new citizens that
No doubt we have achieved Pakistan, but that is only yet the beginning of an end.
Great responsibilities have come to us, and equally great should be our
determination and endeavour to discharge them, and the fulfilment thereof will
demand of us efforts and sacrifices in the cause no less for construction and
building of our nation than what was required for the achievement of the
cherished goal of Pakistan. The time for real solid work has now arrived, and
I have no doubt in my mind that the Muslim genius will put its shoulder to the
wheel and conquer all obstacles in our way on the road, which may appear
uphill.129
A couple of years later, the Prime Minister’s Eid message in July 1950,
though less dramatic, promised an early imposition of a (long-awaited by
some) refugee tax.130 Refugee interest groups welcomed Liaquat’s assur-
ance, but they also cautioned his administration against becoming ‘remote
from those whose will it embodies’: while the state might want to impress
outsiders with what Pakistan had achieved since Independence, ‘we cannot
mould their judgement by pomp and pageantry’.131 On the same day in
Karachi, some 200,000 worshippers offered their Eid prayers in the open
space surrounding Jinnah’s mazar (tomb): ‘From all parts of the city since
early morning … crowds converged on the ground … thousands had to line
themselves up on the road for the prayers … After the prayer was over
nearly every Muslim from the congregation visited the resting place of the
Father of Nation, the Quaid-i-Azam, and paid homage to his memory’.132

128
UKHC, Karachi, Opdom 54, 1–7 July 1948, IOR L/WS/1/1599 BL.
129
See http://m-a-jinnah.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/first-eid-in-pakistan-18th-aug-1947.html
(accessed December 2018).
130
For details on the introduction of a tax bill intended to raise additional revenue for the
relief and rehabilitation of refugees, see statement by Dr Mahmud Hussain, Deputy
Finance Minister, in ‘Facts and Figures on Refugee Relief and Rehabilitation’,
19 October 1950, 890.D.411/10-1950 USNA.
131
‘Transmitting Editorial on Refugee Tax’, 25 July 1950, 890d.411/7-2550 USNA.
132
Dawn, 25 September 1950.
60 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan

Anniversaries and national days, however, could prove to be a double-

edged sword by also creating space for critics of government to air their
dissatisfactions: in Pakistan in 1950, while ‘the din of Independence Day
oration was still echoing’, a Civil and Military Gazette editorial bluntly
observed that ‘[a]t present, the League is, for the vast majority of the
population, a name and not a particularly well-sounding name’.133
In 1954, following a growing split between the party and the federal
government, a group of Muslim League supporters turned the official
Independence Day gathering in Karachi into a very public demonstration
against the incumbent Prime Minister Mohamad Ali Bogra and his
administration. The political atmosphere on the eve of this particular
anniversary was undeniably tense. While the East Bengal governor
had just prorogued the Legislative Assembly in Dhaka to prevent the
provincial – United Front – ministry from being overthrown, students in
Karachi were demonstrating in support of President Nasser in Egypt with
a citywide strike planned for 16 August. Meanwhile, the Muharram
season had reached its climax – significant, bearing in mind local
Sunni-Shia friction – and, in addition, refugees and non-refugees in
Karachi were hugely divided over the local police force.134
India’s national celebrations could likewise prove to be ambiguous
state occasions, which in the years following Partition quickly moved
beyond the apparent muted optimism of the first celebration of August
1947, covered elsewhere.135 Whereas the authorities celebrated the new
Republic in style, the Independence Day celebrations of 1948–50 were
notably restrained and in some senses even ‘gloomy’ according to exter-
nal observers. Just as in Pakistan, these events represented deliberate acts
of political theatre, which attempted to maintain the rhetorical upper
hand in the light of rising public dissatisfaction and accusations against
the new authorities. There was certainly much to play for in the run-up
to India’s first general elections, which partly explains this approach.
However, to a great extent, the muted festivities of the early post-
Independence years reflected a period of deeper attempted official con-
trol of political opposition. In 1948, the Government of India tried to
make it clear that Independence Day should not be treated as a moment
for festive celebration, but instead as a day of remembrance for the
Father of the Nation (Gandhi). Consequently, the attempted pattern

133
Monthly summary of political events in Pakistan – August 1950, 6 September 1950,
790D.00/9-650 USNA.
134
See Sarah Ansari, ‘Police, Corruption and Provincial Loyalties in 1950s Karachi, and
the Case of Sir Gilbert Grace’, South Asian History and Culture 5, 1 (2014), pp. 54–74.
135
Kudaisya, Region, Nation, “Heartland”.
 Projecting the New State 61

was not one of a celebratory holiday, but ceremonies that revolved

around flag hoisting, and police or military parades. The occasion
involved a guard of honour composed of a contingent of the Royal Indian
Navy and of the Royal Indian Air Force.136 Visits accompanied by
homage were paid to the site of Gandhi’s funeral pyre at Raj Ghat, after
which Nehru raised the Indian flag on the Red Fort, in front of a crowd
estimated to be around 200,000. Nehru’s speech expressed the need for
the public to pursue ‘truth and toleration’ and to root out the ‘communal
virus’ from the nation.137 He also appealed once more to public servants
to ‘identify themselves with the needs of the people’.138
Patel’s speech in Delhi on this first anniversary, in contrast, was more
explicit in suggesting the means by which public ceremony could be used
to restrain popular protest: his speech discussed political unrest in nearby
Malaya, Indochina and Burma, and translated this discontent into the
need for India to exercise public discipline, even if this required denying
‘the people, from time to time, a certain degree of personal freedom’.139
The deputy prime minister enthusiastically hailed the fact that the largest
area of territory for over a thousand years had been integrated into the
entity of India – a barely veiled reference to the ongoing integration of
the Princely States. In a more subtle fashion, Patel also associated
the citizen’s ‘duty to neighbours’ with the centrality of ‘loyalty to the
state’ and the need to oppose ‘divided loyalties’.140 Much of the press
meanwhile allowed itself greater scope to celebrate achievements – the
Damodar Valley Scheme, the Hirakud and Bhakra Dams, for instance,
were proudly mentioned by the Hindustan Times. Hindi and Urdu dailies,
such as Hindustan and Hind Samachar (East Punjab) and Navashakti and
Rashtravani (Bihar), even asked the UK High Commissioner for mes-
sages of congratulations to include in their special ‘Independence Day’
issues.141 Indian newspapers on the left, conversely, focussed on a cri-
tique of continued poverty, repudiated pledges and – perhaps most
importantly – the idea that ‘Civil Liberty’ had been ‘the first casualty of
Freedom’. Such press coverage reflected, more strongly, a great deal of
the popular response to the first two years of Independence, manifested

136
‘Mahatma’s Ideals on Greatness’, The Statesman, 16 August 1948.
137
A. C. B. Symon, Acting High Commissioner, Despatch 123, 4 September 1948,
DO133/106 UKNA.
138
‘Mahatma’s Ideals on Greatness’, The Statesman, 16 August 1948.
139
A. C. B. Symon, Acting High Commissioner, Despatch 123, 4 September 1948,
DO133/106 UKNA; ‘Sardar Patel’s Appeal for Co-operation’, The Statesman,
16 August 1948.
140
‘No Room for Divided Loyalty in India’, The Statesman, 16 August 1948.
141
For instance, Jagat Narain to Sir Terence Shone, 30 July 1948, DO133/106 UKNA.
62 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan

in journalistic comments about rising prices, the scarcity of essential

goods and problems of administration. The reference point here was
the recent public security legislation that targeted – alongside communal
organizations – leftist groups. This hesitant mood continued during the
years that followed, with content usually linked to ongoing problems of
the year in question. In 1950, public speeches made a point of the
importance of restraining the ‘degeneration’ of public and commercial
life. Here again, it was Patel who expressed this sentiment most directly:
‘Our public life seems to have degenerated into a fen of stagnant water’
was how he referred specifically to the Congress Party’s ‘lax’ discipline as
compared to its pre-Independence days.142 Significantly, even Nehru
chose this moment to comment specifically on the menace of black
marketeers and continuing problems involved in refugee rehabilitation.143
Just as the new regimes in India and Pakistan changed the nature of
state ceremony, there were efforts to adapt the material iconography of
urban spaces. But here too, the political symbolism of postcolonial
iconoclasm was complicated by local responses to such changes. As Paul
McGarr’s exploration of shifting relations between India and Britain in
the decades following Independence has argued, the politics of statues in
India from the mid-1950s formed part of ‘a broader dialogue between
central and state governments, political parties, the media and the wider
public on the legacy of British colonialism in the subcontinent’: to a great
extent, removing colonial-era statues represented ‘a significant, and per-
haps necessary, step in the creation of a new “imagined” community’.144
At the same time, the decision to remove such reminders of the recent
colonial past, whether in India or Pakistan, was often quite specific in its
historical readings, with statuary and place names relating to, for
instance, the 1857 Mutiny-Rebellion being targeted with particular
urgency. The statue of the nineteenth-century Viceroy Lord Lawrence,
who had led ‘loyal’ troops to recapture Delhi in 1858, was in conse-
quence removed from the Mall in Lahore at the end of August 1950.145
Similarly on 14 May 1957 – the one hundredth anniversary of the
uprising – Nehru delivered a speech in the Lok Sabha suggesting that
British-era statues could be divided into three categories: first, those that
were offensive to national dignity; second, those possessing historic

142
UKHC, New Delhi, Opdom 16, for period 2–16 August 1950, Part 1, Telegram,
DO133/106 UKNA.
143
Ibid., Part II Savingram, DO133/106 UKNA.
144
Paul M. McGarr, ‘The Viceroys Are Disappearing from the Roundabouts in Delhi:
British Symbols of Power in Post-Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies 49, 3 (2015),
p. 790.
145
R. R. Burnett to Maclennan, 4 September 1950, DO133/106 UKNA.
 Projecting the New State 63

significance and, finally, those that were merely artistic. Overall, in most
parts of India there were few powerful voices arguing for the position that
monuments from the British period were ‘offensive to national dignity’.
In fact, significant lobbies existed by now that were in favour of restoring
and maintaining historical artefacts, pictures and statuary. All the same,
in a number of cases (which were, importantly, contingent on moment
and context), statues, other monuments and cemeteries were desecrated,
defaced, destroyed or removed by crowds and focussed popular move-
ments. Agitation also centred on the removal of statues of Queen Victoria
from key public places, including one that was located in front of the
Council Hall in Bombay. Other memorials could trigger more direct
popular reaction. Cemeteries became particular targets for this. The total
number of cemeteries taken over by April 1948 was 812 across India,
254 of which had been abandoned by 1959. Over 300 of the remainder
had to be closed, and there were reports of sites being desecrated espe-
cially when they were located in remote areas.146
The justification for changes in statuary could be more direct at the
level of state governments, with the public meaning of such figures being
openly discussed. Hence, in response to the centenary anniversary of the
1857 Mutiny-Uprising, the Bombay authorities appointed a committee
the following February to examine the issue of how and whether to retain
statues. This team was tasked with identifying, among other things,
which statues were ‘offensive to Indian sentiment from the point of view
of either the uprising of 1857 or other Indian national movements’.147
While its members decided that ‘none were offensive’, they also recom-
mended their gradual removal and replacement with ‘statues and monu-
ments which are more in consonance with the sense of patriotism and
nationalism which has developed since the attainment of independence
in 1947’. Ultimately, in the view of the committee, it was ‘necessary that
such links which publicly and prominently remind us of our past bond-
age and which militate against us our ever developing sense of national-
ism should be gradually done away with’.148

146
Note to Wickson, 6 February 1959, ‘Disposal or Retention of Pictures and Statues of
the British Era in India’, DO133/150 UKNA.
147
Report of the State Committee Appointed to Examine the Question of the Retention in Public
Places of Statues of the British Period and Other Relics (Bombay: Govt. of India Press,
1961), p. 2.
148
Ibid., p. 3. Rather than being melted down, some of these statues ended up in unusual
places. Maharashtra had seventy-five overall and there was a suggestion in September
1961 for an ‘open-air museum’ for them. Others were removed from UP in 1957, where
it was alleged that some found their way into the courtyards of government servants; see
VCM, 20/2/59 UKNA. When a wealthy American collector, Mr Givelber of Cleveland,
Ohio, later wanted to purchase some of the old colonial statues, the Home Department
64 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan

A familiar desire to sweep away the past – for comparable symbolical

reasons – was reflected in the civic planning that went into renaming
thoroughfares across the subcontinent. In the case of Karachi, its Muni-
cipal Corporation announced in April 1949 that it was considering a
scheme to call the city’s principal roads after prominent Pakistani
leaders, while, for ‘the convenience of the public’, the smaller streets
and lanes that ran off them would just be numbered. In 1951, the first
part of this plan was realized, when in February the Karachi Municipal
Advisory Committee ‘accepted amidst applause’ the report of the ten-
man subcommittee, which, ‘yielding to a long-felt public desire’, had
recommended replacing English names with more appropriate ‘local’
alternatives. Of the thirty-three major roads and streets involved, seven
would commemorate important Hindu leaders, while the remainder
were to celebrate Pakistan’s Muslim identity.149 Karachi’s Administra-
tor, Syed Hashim Raza, meanwhile, appealed for public cooperation to
popularize Urdu, calling for it to be used instead of English for name-
plates and boards on buses, shops, offices, banks and other premises in
the federal capital.150 Not all residents of the city approved of these
changes, however. As one disgruntled Karachi correspondent explained,
I am not impressed by the City Fathers’ selection of names for Karachi streets.
I want to ask them why they prefer long names, sometimes longer than the roads
themselves. I won’t shrug my shoulders if they stress the historical or national
importance of these names. The first criterion in selecting a name should be its
brevity. Why not rename a few roads (if possible all) as ‘Red Rose, Lilly White,
Jasmine Wild’, etc. I am sure many would join with me when I say that Red Rose
Road sounds better than, say, Khan Sahib Chaudhry Qadruatullah Road, which
it is difficult to utter in one breath or even two.151

Conclusion
The political symbolism bound up in annual national events such as
India’s ‘Independence Day’ linked official and ‘sanitized’ readings of its
anti-colonial past with ideas of a future democratic governance. In a
similar fashion, the Pakistani authorities, whether on secular state

of India sought the advice of the UK government. Other statues turned up in unusual
places – for instance, when the water level dropped in the Ambajheri tank in Nagpur in
1961, a statue of Victoria was found in the bottom; see R Courts to the High
Commissioner for the UK, New Delhi, 29 December 1961, DO133/150 UKNA. The
nine-foot marble edifice was subsequently whisked away and leaned up against a local
Public Works Department godown; see J. R. G. Wythers to Guy, 11 December 1961,
DO133/150 UKNA.
149 150 151
Dawn, n.d. February 1951. Ibid. Ibid.
 Conclusion 65

occasions or religious ones, sought to emphasize crucial differences

between the past and the present, while holding out promises for the
future. But as demonstrated by contemporary reactions in locations such
as UP and Sindh, this was not a symbolism over which the authorities in
either Delhi or Karachi had total control. Colonial officialdom had never
presupposed any kind of political or cultural unity across what was
British India. As an Indian ‘Empire’, it had served the interests of rulers
to encourage regional differentiation, downplay the idea of a ‘unified’
India and, not least, uphold many of the particular privileges of the
Princely States. From the perspective of Delhi after August 1947, this
legacy, combined with the fact of Pakistan’s creation, made it all the
more important to early postcolonial publicists to reiterate the intercon-
nectedness of the new state’s regions, and not just by talking about a
single nation. The demographic audiences for the ‘idea’ of India had to
be emotionally connected – via cultural and historical symbols that
traversed the spaces separating them – and brought into dialogue through
processes of political enactment. The same priorities applied as far as
Pakistan’s authorities were concerned, where the rationale for its separate
creation in August 1947 had to be continually reinforced as a way – at
least in theory – of stressing what its people shared, whether or not they
were Muslims and wherever they lived.
What this chapter’s exploration of developments in the context of
UP and Sindh, and cities such as Delhi and Karachi, has highlighted
is that at first these representations built upon clearly defined agents –
from government servants and politicians to pamphleteers, artists and
architects – all of whom proved to be tacit in their role.152 But they were
later disrupted, and sometimes re-appropriated, by groups who were using
them in a range of different localities and often for their own purposes.153
Indeed, this combination of state-driven and quotidian vision reveals a
great deal about the day-to-day differentiated spatial responses to citizens’
identity. They highlight just how far symbolic communication could be a
fragile and contingent phenomenon, in which the relationship between
different places could and did make a difference.
Moreover, as we have suggested through our focus on Sindh and UP,
these efforts – shaped and directed by politicians and civil servants in the
two capital cities located in close proximity – took place in a variety of

152
Joanne Roberts, ‘From Know-How to Show-How? Questioning the Role of
Information and Communication Technologies in Knowledge Transfer’, Technology
Analysis and Strategic Management 12, 4 (2000), pp. 429–43.
153
Keith Axel, ‘Anthropology and the New Technologies of Communication’, Cultural
Anthropology 21, 3 (2008), pp. 354–84.
66 ‘Performing the State’ in Post-1947 India and Pakistan

hyper-textual, material and performative ways, meeting and responding

(to varying extents) to localism, and sometimes being informed by it, as
symbolic ideas circulated across the ‘spaces’ now occupied by the Indian
and Pakistani states. But, as it turned out, these means of symbolic
communication, precisely because they were spatial, could not simply
be rhetorical. In independent India, they had to take into account that
there were linguistically and culturally varied ‘publics’,154 which also
helped to build and bolster notions of civic belonging around diverse
ideas of the past. Precisely because these ideas circulated regionally,
culturally and socially, they could be reformed and transgressed in the
process, and consequently develop into a wide range of other political
symbols with potentially insurgent effects. Over in Pakistan, the situation
had a somewhat different gloss. Rather than diverse ideas of the past
feeding into what it now meant to belong as an ‘Indian’, the process there
hinged on an assumed ‘common past’, that of the subcontinent’s
Muslims, which was deployed to construct a sense of belonging in the
present. Accordingly, state representatives as well as interest groups and
individuals in Pakistan tended to emphasize that, despite the distances
separating its constituent parts and peoples, all were now involved in the
shared enterprise of constructing a ‘nation’ out of its component elem-
ents, irrespective of whether or not they actually shared the same reli-
gious identity. Nonetheless, on both sides of the post-1947 divide,
citizenship ideas in practice were made more ‘vernacular’, and shaped
if not necessarily reconfigured, by popular engagement with the idea of
‘citizenship’, whether this was propelled from below or directed
from above.

154
Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
2 People on the Move
Refugees and Minorities in Uttar Pradesh and Sindh

Newspaper columns published in Dawn by Pakistan’s leading female

journalist of the 1940s and 1950s, Zeb-un-Nissa Hamidullah,1 provide
a vivid sense of the frustrations experienced by many people living in
Karachi as it swelled in size from c. 350,000 inhabitants in 1947 to nearly
1.5 million just five years later. The following commentary – produced in
May 1952 just as the Muslim month of fasting (Ramadan) was begin-
ning, with temperatures soaring and water in short supply – drew atten-
tion to the routine trials and tribulations that the city’s inhabitants were
experiencing in the early 1950s:
We could talk about the water shortage. Yes we’ve got something there.
Something that could work us into an emotional frenzy especially when we
remember the daily little irritations due to lack of sufficient water even for a
daily bath. We could talk about the housing problem. A topic as old as yesterday
and as young as today. In Karachi at least. We could point out that nothing, or so
little as to be insignificant, has been done to ease the situation for the average
man. … We could. But we won’t. Enough is enough and the heat is almost more
than we can bear today without adding to it.2
Chapter 1 has explored how ideas, promises and agendas originating in
the nationalist movements of the first half of the twentieth century shaped
not only the policies of independent governments in South Asia but also
the kinds of demands that their new citizens made of them. At the same
time, as post-Independence developments in localities such as UP and
Sindh remind us, the modus operandi of many institutions involved in
what people thought of as the ‘state’ did not change, or changed very
little, during the years under scrutiny here.

1
Born to a Bengali father and English mother in Calcutta and married into a Punjabi
family, Zeb-un-Nissa [Zaibunnisa] Hamidullah (1918–2000) had started writing for
newspapers, including Bombay’s The Illustrated Weekly of India, before Independence.
Her ‘Thru’ a Woman’s Eyes’ column in Dawn (later renamed ‘Between Ourselves’ and
extended to cover broader issues) made her Pakistan’s first female political commentator.
2
‘Thru’ a Woman’s Eyes’, Dawn, 26 May 1952.

67
68 Refugees and Minorities in Uttar Pradesh and Sindh

There were both structural and contingent reasons for this continuity:
crucial administrative and executive functions of government (from trad-
itions and hierarchies in the public services and policing to mundane
forms of bureaucratic writing and procedure) remained largely intact
across South Asia following the British departure. In India, the postco-
lonial administration was quickly integrated into the parallel functions of
the dominant political party – the Congress – which allowed for an array
of semi-formal political functions in the work of the local state alongside
political leaderships at national as well as provincial level. In Pakistan,
where the Muslim League at this time still enjoyed a dominance that
belied its strength on the ground, the administration alongside the army
served as the only properly established structure of governance in the
early period following Independence, and even then, at a federal and at a
more local level, it faced a huge test in terms of piecing together an
integrated bureaucratic structure out of former provincial arrangements.
The lingering aftershocks of the Second World War also allowed for
continuities. Wartime rationing and requisitioning introduced in British
India (which had continued after the conflict had ended in 1945) had
stretched the colonial bureaucracy to its widest extent to date, while, at
the same time, exposing new weaknesses and opening up fresh oppor-
tunities to identify and critique political and administrative ‘corruption’.
The more general limitations of the everyday postcolonial state from
poor planning to deficient implementation and uneven access to
resources, enlarged the rhetorical space in which essential issues, such
as citizenship, could be raised and discussed.3 In addition, these debates
were often configured strongly around what was imagined to be
happening in other places (i.e. across the new border), principally as an
outcome or legacy of the physical movement of peoples before, during
and following Partition.
Political freedoms associated with Independence brought with them
throughout the subcontinent a heightened consciousness as to how
governments were expected to operate after 14/15 August 1947. In
particular, there was often popular support for the idea that the new
authorities needed to move away from – even reject – the old bureau-
cratic approaches of British India. The demise of colonial rule had raised
hopeful expectations that things would be run differently in the future.
This anticipation was further amplified by the mass migrations that
‘bookended’ Independence and their impact on individuals, wider

3
William Gould, Taylor C. Sherman and Sarah Ansari, ‘The Flux of the Matter: Loyalty,
Corruption and the “Everyday State” in the Post-Partition Government Services of India
and Pakistan’, Past & Present 219, 1 (2013), pp. 237–79.
 Refugees and Minorities in Uttar Pradesh and Sindh 69

society and the workings of the state. Decolonization, or the end of

empire, in short, cultivated new public expectations, and this anticipa-
tion transformed rapidly as the two new postcolonial regimes established
themselves, both internally and also in relation to each other. Absolutely
central to this political adjustment were popular ideas about national and
regional ‘belonging’, which in both India and Pakistan now translated
into a fundamental tension in the form of a dichotomy between the
promises of democratic change on the one hand and the realities of
how the bureaucracies running them continued to operate on the other.
At the same time, while the wheels of government often turned in much
the same way as they had done in the late colonial period, the theoretical
reach of the independent state into areas of development, welfare and
local political change raised levels of public expectation enormously.
Independence, however, did not change the fact that, as before 14/
15 August 1947, most Indians and Pakistanis continued to experience
and perceive ‘government’ in terms of the lower-level officials who
manned bureaucracies, and with whom they came into direct contact.
This continued to be so even where the expressed objectives of these
functionaries had allegedly changed according to the rhetoric of political
leaderships at the centre, whether this was Delhi or Karachi.4 In this
regard, there existed in practice spatial and conceptual disjunctures
between what India’s and Pakistan’s new citizens ‘heard’ in their leaders’
speeches – relayed to them in the press or by word of mouth – and what
they experienced first-hand at the level of the province, district or city
and town where they lived. At a public meeting held in Lahore in August
1949, for instance, Liaquat Ali Khan asserted that everyone in Pakistan
had the same right ‘to be provided with food, shelter, clothing, education
and medical facilities’, implying that the state recognized its responsi-
bilities for providing the run-of-the-mill necessities of life.5 In a similarly
paternalistic vein at a public meeting in New Delhi at the end of January
1948, Liaquat’s Indian counterpart Jawaharlal Nehru had presented the
‘raising of three hundred and forty or fifty million people, raising them
economically, certainly raising them educationally’ as a major national
problem.6
But, just as under colonial rule, the provision of basic services
remained chiefly in the hands of provincial or state-level government

4
Akhil Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2012), pp. 81–2.
5
Pakistan Times, n.d. August 1949.
6
Address at a public meeting in connection with Sarvodaya Day, New Delhi, 30 January
1950, Jawaharlal Nehru Collected Works, Vol. 14, p. 284.
70 Refugees and Minorities in Uttar Pradesh and Sindh

departments. While public health, education and labour legislation were

coordinated by the central authorities, it was still provincial or state
ministries that set the all-important prices for – and when necessary (as
often happened during the post-1947 years) rationed – essential food
grains, sugar and other commodities in short supply.7 Equally, govern-
ment officials working at the local level – such as district magistrates and
police superintendents – retained primary responsibility for the routine
maintenance of law and order. Hence, ‘to the ordinary man Government
truly [began] with the provincial administration and its local representa-
tive’; it was there that ‘the machinery of law and order, of taxation, of
flood control and irrigation’ started to operate, for while ‘the bureau-
cratic apparatus functions impersonally, the character of the provincial
ministry [could] make a real impression on the popular imagination’, in
effect distinguishing the ‘machine’ from its ‘operator’.8 This chapter is
accordingly explores these tensions and the ways in which they played
out, often in an interrelated cross-border manner, in the different spaces
and jurisdictions of India and Pakistan, and in particular, from our
perspective, in Sindh and UP.
As our Introduction has already suggested, there could be variations
between different states/provinces in relation to their respective central
authority, with the result that Indian and Pakistani citizenship often
tended to be ‘imagined’ in terms of geographical and jurisdictional
spaces and distances. Just as this could be the case within India and
Pakistan (for instance, in the relationship between UP and Delhi or that
between Sindh and Karachi), a similar spatial relationship also existed
between India and Pakistan. Put another way, though the locality deter-
mined the representatives of the state with whom citizens came into
contact, the nature of these dealings was frequently discussed and acted
upon in relation to understandings of what was happening (or perhaps
what people thought was happening) elsewhere, whether on their side of
the border or across it. As Arjun Appadurai has emphasized, local
communities tend to be formed in ways that are ‘relational and context-
ual’, as opposed to stemming from some inherently ‘scalar or spatial’
characteristics.9 In the 1940s and 1950s South Asia, this was more than
just thinking about Indian or Pakistani identity as a mirror of the ‘other’
country: public opinion could equally be conditioned by more localized

7
Richard Symonds, The Making of Pakistan (2nd ed., London: Faber & Faber, 1950),
pp. 180–1.
8
Keith Callard, Pakistan: a Political Study (London: Allen & Unwin, 1957) p. 268.
9
Arjun Appadurai, ‘The Production of Locality’, in his Modernity at Large: Cultural
Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996),
pp. 178–9.
 Refugee Rehabilitation and the Predicament of Minorities 71

reactions to people arriving from other places or others leaving their

families and goods behind – population movements, the presence of
refugees in the cities of northern India and West Pakistan (particularly
in UP and Sindh) and the thorny issue of evacuee property. It is with
these themes that this chapter is concerned.

Refugee Rehabilitation and the Predicament of Minorities

The movement of people across the border between India and Pakistan
was not simply one of the most extraordinary instances of human move-
ment in the twentieth century because of its scale. Though a definitive
total is impossible to provide thanks to the massive demographic confu-
sion that Partition produced, an estimated fourteen to sixteen million
people sought to cross the hastily delineated borders in what remains
arguably the largest migration in history. In the north-west, the Grand
Trunk Road together with the railway built alongside it became major
arteries along which huge numbers of these refugees travelled. Further
south, people crossed the Rajasthan border into and out of Sindh or
travelled by ship between the port cities of Bombay and Karachi. In
divided Bengal, refugees also moved in both directions across the new
Indo-Pakistan frontier, though the pattern of migration here was qualita-
tively different to its western counterpart on account of the more porous
nature of this border.10 Across North India, in both the east and the west,
people were on the move during the months surrounding Independence,
and this movement continued to ebb and flow in the years that followed.
What marks this enormous human movement out from other compar-
able mass migrations, apart from its size, are two other features. First was
its coincidence with the creation of two independent countries, which
meant that the movement, displacement and rehabilitation of migrants
became an integral part of the wider process of formal citizenship defin-
ition.11 Second, and perhaps of greater significance for our discussion,
were the ways in which not only movement but anticipation of movement
conferred on people the status of belonging and generated ideas about
rights. So, before an individual or family had even decided or started to

10
For a study of the rich literature that has been spawned through the historical
imagination of Bengali-speaking writers in West Bengal and Bangladesh through issues
of homelessness, migration and exile, which highlights how the Partition of Bengal in
1947 has thrown a long shadow over memories and cultural practices there, see Debjani
Sengupta, The Partition of Bengal: Fragile Borders and New Identities (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015).
11
For the clearest study of this process to date, see Joya Chatterji, ‘South Asian Histories of
Citizenship, 1946–1970’, The Historical Journal 55, 4 (December 2012), pp. 1049–71.
72 Refugees and Minorities in Uttar Pradesh and Sindh

migrate from either India or Pakistan, they could be marked out as

potential citizens of the other, and hence no longer living in the right
place or deemed to possess the rights that came with being categorized
as either Indian or Pakistani. This presumption did not only exist in
government ordinances – rapidly constructed to deal with the exchange
of populations – it was also embedded in wider public political discourse.
Clearly a product of the massive refugee rehabilitation process, it was
linked to the pressing need to solve the problem of property and property
rights, such as how to decide what happened to the homes and other
buildings owned by those assumed to have transferred their loyalties
across the border, whether or not they had actually left. The implications
surrounding the idea of ‘intending evacuees’ were far-reaching. On
the one hand, conceptual connections were made between India’s and
Pakistan’s jurisdictional spaces and the notion of the citizen in both
countries. On the other, associated ideas of ‘minority loyalty’ were also
in tension, if not contradiction, with the unfolding rights of citizenship
contained within the constitutional documents of both India and
Pakistan as these materialized in the decade following Independence.
In exploring these processes, historical focus has been on the main
regions of refugee movement and settlement, especially around the main
cities in divided Punjab and Bengal, which has brought its own limita-
tions. As Gyanendra Pandey emphasized more than two decades ago in
his pioneering exploration of developments in Delhi in 1947–8, the city
did ‘not represent all of India’. For him, it made ‘no sense to try to speak
of India as a whole in any summary way’. Rather his focus on one locale,
he argued, allowed him ‘to speak in relatively concrete terms, …
because – for a variety of reasons – Delhi reflected in concentrated form
several tendencies that were at work in other parts of the subcontinent
too in 1947’.12 In the years since Pandey justified linking the local with
the national, and in the process highlighted the wider significance of
Delhi’s transformation into a ‘refugee-istan’, extensive research has been
conducted on the nature of Partition migration and associated ‘Relief
and Rehabilitation’ efforts in relation to how this upheaval affected the
former British India provinces of the Punjab and Bengal in particular.13

12
Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Partition and Independence in Delhi: 1947–1948’, Economic and
Political Weekly 32, 36 (6–12 September 1997), p. 2262.
13
See, for instance, Vazira Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South
Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories, Cultures of History (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2007); Ravinder Kaur, Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants of
Delhi (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007); Uditi Sen, ‘Refugees and the Politics
of Nation Building in India, 1947–1971’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of
Cambridge, 2009); and Haimanti Roy, Partitioned Lives: Migrants, Refugees, Citizens in
 Refugee Rehabilitation and the Predicament of Minorities 73

But both UP in India and Sindh in Pakistan remain less well-known

localities in this respect, despite offering rich opportunities for exploring
Indo–Pakistani interactions in this period.
Both regions were pivotally important to the politics of refugees. UP,
after all, was the key point of origin for some of the most influential
Muslim migrants to Pakistan as well as large numbers of Urdu-speaking
refugees (known as muhajirs) who headed for the province of Sindh
where Pakistan’s capital city Karachi was located. Moving in the other
direction, Sindhi Hindus were certainly among the best-organized
migrants to make their new homes in UP. While UP was not required
to accommodate the same quantity of refugees as Indian Punjab, its
status as arguably India’s politically most important constituent state-
unit (and certainly its largest in terms of population14) meant that it
provided a highly symbolic ‘test area’ for how refugee rehabilitation
might be effective more generally. Likewise, while Sindhi Muslims were
marginalized within Pakistan’s new political establishment, the fact
remained that Karachi was now the federal capital and so many of the
broader debates about refugees and matters concerning their relief and
rehabilitation centred on this city and its hinterland. In other words,
though their shares of the overall refugee population may have been
smaller in numerical terms than those of the Punjab and Bengal, UP
and Sindh provided the major contexts within which many of the anx-
ieties generated by Partition later came to be discussed and played out.
When exploring the massive range of documents generated by Parti-
tion, what is immediately striking are the extraordinary and complex
connections between the rapidly changing decisions of government and
the lives of those either migrating or living in areas of mass migration. At
the same time, as other historians have noted,15 available written sources
reveal a vast but important dichotomy between government statements
and resolutions – the rhetoric of the central governments of India and
Pakistan (and indeed their provincial or state governments too) and the
reality on the ground. One of the most important instances of this
dichotomy surrounded post-Partition reconstruction, and, in particular,

India and Pakistan, 1947–1965 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012). The last is a
focussed study of developments relating to the two Bengals in the wake of Independence
and Partition.
14
According to the 2011 Indian Census, UP’s population of 199,281,477 represented
16.49 per cent of the population of the country as a whole and it was the largest Indian
state in terms of population. See www.census2011.co.in/states.php (accessed
December 2018).
15
See, for instance, Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan
(London: Yale University Press, 2007).
74 Refugees and Minorities in Uttar Pradesh and Sindh

the idea of relational minority safeguards. Indeed, this issue had lain at
the very root of some of the earliest negotiations surrounding the division
of British India into two or more separate independent countries. Some-
times referred to as the ‘hostage theory’, the idea that each new dominion
would trade the safeguards of its minorities with the other was part of the
Muslim League’s fundamental strategy and found a place in the 1940
Lahore (or Pakistan) Resolution.16 After Independence, this understand-
ing was formalized in the India–Pakistan agreement of 19 April 1948 at
the Inter-Dominion Conference held in Calcutta, according to which
each was required to protect its own minorities. In implementing minor-
ity safeguards, the agreement presupposed that the important areas of
contention in minority-rights protection would lie in the actions of local
officers, recommending that:
The two dominions and their provincial governments shall declare and make it
widely known to their officers and other employees that any government servant
proved to have been guilty either of dereliction of duty in protecting the lives and
properties of the members of the minority community, or of directly or indirectly
ill-treating the members of the minority community, or showing prejudice against
the minority community in the discharge of duties, shall receive exemplary and
deterrent punishment.17
It detailed how adequate steps should be taken to remove discrimination
in the grant of export licenses and railway priorities, or to remove the
tendencies towards economic boycott. It also dealt with the issue of
refugee property and of refugees, which by early 1948 had revealed itself
as a problem that was unlikely to be resolved without some kind of
coordination of this kind.18
The influx of refugees to UP from places that would later become
Pakistan had begun on a large scale from as early as the end of February
1947. The first rush went to Saharanpur (a major railway junction) and
Dehradun, and many were accommodated in dharamshalas and gurd-
waras. The pressure on the city of Hardwar in the north-west of what was
still then called the United Provinces was particularly heavy, resulting in
a need for the Rampur camp to make space, by the end of 1948, for
thousands of extra individuals. By June 1947, 5,000 refugees had already
arrived, triggering instructions to Town Rationing Officers (TROs) and

16
Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
17
‘Each Dominion to Protect Its Own Minorities – Abolition of Barriers against Food
Movements Recommended – India Pakistan Agreement at Calcutta’, National Herald,
20 April 1948.
18
Ibid.
 Refugee Rehabilitation and the Predicament of Minorities 75

to District Refugee Officers to manage the newcomers. Over the summer

of 1947, the inflow rapidly increased. In August 1947, 45,000 arrived,
and in September another 70,000, inflating the total to around 200,000
by the end of that month. The peak month proved to be January 1948,
when 74,000 crossed over. By April 1948, the total had reached around
450,000. This mass migration of displaced persons into UP led directly
to the promulgation of an ordinance for the registration of refugees,19 a
process that had the effect of actually encouraging further migrants who
perceived this move as a means by which provinces would take responsi-
bility for rehabilitation. Eventually, as well as those formally recognized
as refugees, an additional 150,000 ‘unregistered’ new arrivals made their
way there.20
The situation on the ground in Sindh turned out to be very similar in
terms of scale, if not timing; refugees only started arriving there in
sizeable numbers in the run-up to Independence. But in July 1948, the
Pakistan–Sind Joint Refuge Council reported that more than 700,000
Muslim refugees had entered the province since the previous August.
Nearly 75 per cent of these had congregated in Karachi, while the
remainder were mostly to be found in Sindh’s larger towns, with only
a small proportion – some 60,000 – in the countryside.21 By 1951 (the
time of Pakistan’s first national census), with communal disturbances
in northern India adding another influx of around 80,000 refugees,
Karachi’s population had more than doubled to just over one million.22
This expansion was generating a myriad of practical problems in a city
not designed to accommodate such numbers: according to a statement
issued in August 1950 by Pakistan’s Ministry for Refugees and
Rehabilitation,
the entire administrative machinery, whether in respect of sanitation and public
health or water supply or housing [has been] put out of gear. What makes the
problem still more complicated is that this surplus is not static, but is continually
and rapidly increasing.23

In India, in contrast to the pronouncements made by politicians at the

centre, there was little discussion of active measures at the state level to

19
‘Resume of the Activities of the Refugee Department’ in ‘Refugee Standing Committee
Proceedings’, Relief and Rehabilitation, Box 23, File 341/48 UPSA.
20
Ibid.
21
K. R. Sipe, ‘Karachi’s refugee crisis: the political, economic and social consequences of
partition-related migration’ (unpublished PhD, Duke University, 1976), p. 252.
22
Ibid., pp. 134–7.
23
‘Statement by Refugee Minister on Refugee Problem’, 10 August 1950, 890D.411/8-
1050 United States National Archives (hereafter USNA).
76 Refugees and Minorities in Uttar Pradesh and Sindh

protect minorities or to implement the reciprocal aspects of the agree-

ment even in the local legislative assemblies. With the return to India in
March 1948 of a sizeable number of Muslims who had initially left UP
during the Partition violence, Mahavir Tyagi, a member of the right wing
of the UP Congress,24 issued a press statement in Lucknow. For Tyagi,
Hindus from Pakistan continued to possess the right to take refuge in
North India. They had not been, he argued, a willing party to Partition.
On the other hand, as a secular state, while India might have a ‘duty’ to
Muslims, evidently there was ‘no space for all of these [returning]
people’. Therefore, for Tyagi, Pakistan should either cede to India some
districts of the Punjab to provide that badly needed extra space or agree
to rehabilitate some of these returning Muslims.25 Tyagi’s call for action
was representative of both a popular response among some Indians to
Pakistani migrants26 and a powerful section of the central and provincial
government of the time.27 It was a position also taken in the context of
the dissolution of the main political party of the Muslims in UP – the
Muslim League – as we will see later in this chapter.
Official messages that addressed the issue of refugees, however, were
more cautious and proved to be much the same in Pakistan as well as
India. State-level and provincial authorities, on both sides of the border,
released carefully tailored publicity at regular intervals about what was
being done for refugees,28 especially where property acquisition and
redistribution was complicated by the more informal, and sometimes
illegal, activities of refugee societies and associations.29 In an article
published in the press under the banner heading ‘More than 20,000
Refugees Already resettled in UP’, the UP Rehabilitation Minister
Govind Sahai, for instance, announced in early January 1948 that more
than 20,000 refugees had already been settled in his particular state

24
See William Gould, Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chapter IV.
25
‘India Bound Movement of Muslims: Tyagi’s Warning to Government’, National
Herald, 12 April 1948.
26
This sentiment was expressed in the Hindi press’s reaction to the return migration of
‘disappointed’ Muslims, see ‘Pakistan Musulmanon ka ghar’, Aaj, 3 January 1948.
27
India’s first Home Minister, Vallabhai Patel, as we saw in Chapter 1, had also famously
expressed the need for Muslims to demonstrate their loyalty to the Indian state.
28
See, for instance, the Proceedings of Relief and Rehabilitation Committees, in
‘Construction of Small and Pucca Shops in Parts of Lucknow’, Relief and
Rehabilitation, Box 40, File 213/49 UPSA. These files discussed amounts budgeted
for rehabilitation but without a discussion of the results of such expenditure or its
relative scale.
29
Secretary of the Lahore Refugee Society, Agra – Dewan Hukum Chand to Chief Secr.
UP, ‘Construction at Agra’, 14 January 1952, Relief and Rehabilitation, Box 45, File 13
(6)/51 UPSA.
 Refugee Rehabilitation and the Predicament of Minorities 77

alone. During the following year, or so he claimed, the UP government

looked set to spend Rs. 2 crores (20 million) on rehabilitation, and
he proceeded to outline the various schemes that it had inaugurated,
arguing that 20,000–25,000 of the new arrivals had successfully secured
industrial employment.30 The UP government similarly publicized the
extent to which it went to establish a separate colony for refugees in
Allahabad, adding that it would advance Rs. 1.5 lakhs (150,000) to
support further schemes of this kind.31 Radha Kant, UP’s Director of
Resettlement and Employment, reported in mid-April 1948 that thus
far 150,000 ex-servicemen and civilians had been registered with
employment exchanges and 28,000 provided with employment. Like-
wise, 2,650 refugees had been absorbed into the services.32 As ‘a step
towards ameliorating the hardship of refugees’, the UP government
relaxed the maximum age limit by four years to twenty-seven for the civil
service judicial branch examination.33 Given the scale of the problem –
there were around 600,000 refugees present in UP by mid-1948 – these
initiatives were relatively limited in scope. It took until July 1948 for
a Rehabilitation Finance Administration to come into existence, and
housing remained in short supply, with the UP authorities themselves
admitting that about 300,000 refugees (or 60,000 families) would not be
accommodated by formal rehabilitation in housing.34
It was much the same story in Sindh – albeit with its own local twist on
developments – which experienced a complex combination of political
and economic knock-on effects of movement on this massive scale. While
the volume of migrants heading to the province was considerably smaller
than either the numbers going to West Punjab or to East Bengal, their
local impact was disproportionately boosted by the fact that Karachi,
Pakistan’s new capital, was located there.35 By September 1947, the city
contained some 10,000 refugees, the majority housed in three huge
camps, and so – with tensions rising – the provincial authorities that
month passed the Sind Maintenance of Public Safety Ordinance, osten-
sibly to protect minority interests.36 In actual fact, the legislation served

30 31 32
National Herald, 12 April 1948. Ibid. National Herald, 18 April 1948.
33
‘Another Concession to Refugees’, National Herald, 16 April 1948.
34
‘Resume of the Activities of the Refugee Department’ in ‘Refugee Standing Committee
Proceedings’, Relief and Rehabilitation, Box 23, File 341/48 UPSA.
35
It should be noted that while Karachi was detached from the province of Sindh in
1948 and turned into a separate Federal Capital Territory, it remained the biggest
urban centre in the locality, and hence acted as a magnet drawing refugees to this part
of Pakistan. See Sarah Ansari, Life after Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in
Sindh, 1947–1962 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2005), chapter 1.
36
‘Promulgation of Sind Maintenance of Public Safety Ordinance 1947’, Despatch 206,
23 September 1947, 845F.00/9-2347 USNA.
78 Refugees and Minorities in Uttar Pradesh and Sindh

only to heighten minority concerns, and the number of non-Muslims

seeking to leave for India rocketed upwards. Some 50,000 registered with
local Congress organizations for travel assistance, provoking reactions
that ranged from claims that this was all part of ‘a well organised plan to
cripple Pakistan’ to the solemn reiteration of earlier promises to protect
the place of minorities within the new country.37 Sindh Chief Minister
M. A. Khuhro, however, adopted a particularly hard line, publicly
denouncing the desire of Hindus and Sikhs to leave and threatening that
if they chose to go then they would be allowed to take very few posses-
sions with them.38 Following a relatively rare outbreak of communal
violence in January 1948 involving migrants arriving in and leaving the
city, the exodus picked up momentum, drawing in up-country Hindus as
well as others based closer to Karachi and prompting steps by the
provincial authorities to stem the outward flow: confidential orders were
issued allowing non-Muslims to leave only if they were in possession of a
special permit from their district magistrate and could produce income
tax certificates to prove that they had no outstanding public debts.39
These moves proved futile, and by March more than 50,000 a week were
departing by sea for Indian ports, while others made the trip by train.40
Meanwhile, official publications boldly proclaimed the efforts being
expended by the Pakistani authorities, at the centre and at a provincial
level, to deal with the refugee crisis. In Sindh, as elsewhere in Pakistan,
the way in which the authorities approached and handled space for
migrants was inevitably influenced by the broader administrative and
political framework within which these processes took place. An All-
Pakistan Joint Refugees Council was established at the end of 1947 to
synchronize the undertakings of its provincial counterparts. A central
ministry coordinated provincial refugee rehabilitation efforts, while the
Quaid-i-Azam Relief Fund provided a centralized structure for coordin-
ating the various provincial, central and private relief agencies that had
mushroomed since Independence.41 Another initiative was the Pakistan
Refugee Rehabilitation Finance Corporation, set up in 1948 with Rs. 1

37
‘Refugee Problem in Pakistan’, Despatch 141, 22 September 1947, 845.00/9-2247,
USNA. ‘Refugee Situation in Pakistan’, Despatch 177, 13 October 1947, 845F.00/10-
1327 USNA.
38
The Chief Secretary to the Sindh government even resigned in protest at Khuhro’s very
public contradiction of earlier assurances that the rights of minorities would be
respected, see Despatch 29, 15 September 1947, 845F.00/9-1547 USNA.
39
UK High Commission Opdom 8, 15–21 January 1948, IOR L/WS/1/1599 British
Library (hereafter BL).
40
Despatch 244, 18 March 1948, 845.00/3-1848 USNA.
41
‘Facts and Figures on Refugee Relief and Rehabilitation’, 19 October 1950, 890D.411/
10-1950 USNA.
 Refugee Rehabilitation and the Predicament of Minorities 79

crore to invest. Among the refugee projects helped in different parts of

Sindh were those involving refugee shoemakers (who had clustered in the
newly constructed Nazimabad district of Karachi), glass-bangle produ-
cers (from Firozabad in western UP) and migrant blanket-makers in
Sukkur.42 Attempts to set up cottage industries that might provide
female refugees with sources of income also attracted much press cover-
age together with the moral backing of prominent Pakistani women such
as Fatima Jinnah and Raana Liaquat Ali Khan. The effectiveness of these
rehabilitation efforts, however, was often disputed by contemporaries,
some with their own axes to grind. In April 1949, for instance, the then
central minister for refugees and rehabilitation, Khwaja Shahabuddin,
accused the Sindh provincial administration of obstructing his rehabili-
tation programme, claiming that
in certain areas, Government officials and local people intentionally put spanners
across the progress of rehabilitation work. In many districts and talukas, local
officials [have] cold-shouldered the refugees and shown much indifference in
making allotments, thereby causing a lot of unrest among refugees … The
refugees are anxious to be able to stand on their own legs, but this is not
possible unless they are given their due.43

Corresponding propaganda about refugee rehabilitation in UP was rea-

sonably effective given the evident problems of nationally organized
rehabilitation attempts undertaken during this same period. Indeed, the
view from Delhi was far from rosy: on 5 January 1948 the police resorted
to using tear gas to disperse a crowd of refugees who had recently arrived
from West Punjab and which had gathered in Khari Baoli to take forcible
possession of houses in Phatak Habish Khan vacated by Muslims.44 In
April 1948, the reported scenes at Chandni Chowk of increasing
numbers of street hawkers, and overcrowded properties, were supple-
mented by Nehru’s announcement that the city could not possibly
absorb any more refugees and that the country had already taken in five
lakhs since Partition.45 These words of caution echoed statements by
Khuhro in Karachi who earlier that year had already sought to limit – on
the grounds that ‘for every one Hindu that [sic] has left, two Muslims
have come in’46 – the arrival of further incomers.47 But the combination
of events at these two scales of nation and province contributed to calls to

42
‘Development of Industries’, Despatch 46, 8 July 1950, 890D.19/7-850 USNA.
43 44
Dawn, 22 April 1949. Ibid.
45
‘Delhi Overflowing with Refugees. City Can Take No More’, National Herald, 6
April 1948.
46
Dawn, 18 January 1948.
47
For more details, see Sarah Ansari, ‘Partition, Migration and Refugees: Responses to the
Arrival of Muhajirs in Sind after 1947’, in Freedom, Trauma, Continuities: Northern India
80 Refugees and Minorities in Uttar Pradesh and Sindh

seize and make use of empty properties for incoming refugees in both
places. Consequently, ministries across North India were given great
public support for policies of evacuee property acquisition. This was
perhaps most starkly emphasized in a newspaper article arguing for the
allotment of the (empty) house of Jinnah to a refugee, which premised
that equivalent large houses had been left vacant in Karachi and allotted
to incoming migrants.48
It was this context – the problems of using property and space for
rehabilitation, and a public awareness that the ‘refugee situation’
appeared increasingly chaotic – that contributed to the problematic and
uneven shape of citizenship rights for UP’s remaining Muslim commu-
nities. And this took place whether or not they had any connection to
Pakistan or had any intention to migrate there. Simply being Muslim in
parts of North India, and in most instances living in Muslim neighbour-
hoods where some families may have left (especially in cities and often for
reasons of security) undermined presumptions that they should be auto-
matically viewed as full rights-bearing citizens. As we will see below and
in other chapters, despite the nature of uniform rights granted in India’s
Constitution, this situation created an unevenness in citizenship that
required some groups to volunteer expressions of loyalty and to assert
rights. For others, such rights were automatic and hence invisible. This
contingency and unevenness or rights conferral was to have extensive
implications for how other groups protected and promoted their rights,
especially for groups whose situation placed them on the margins of
majoritarian expectations of the citizen. At one level, the supposition
about individual, family and community intentions of Muslims in North
India was a product of the rehabilitation crisis. The drive to accommo-
date Hindu and Sikh migrants from Pakistan became tangled up with the
identification of ‘intending evacuees’ to Pakistan, which was both a
formal and informal categorization. However, in juxtaposing official with
popular and organization-based documents, the predicament of UP
Muslims (like Muslims in India more generally) was also moulded by
changing political circumstances, and the expression of public opinion
about minorities.
Disputes associated with the vexed question of refugee rehabilitation
raised questions about where the loyalties of minorities lay, as testified by
lengthy discussions in Pakistani and Indian newspapers alike.49 Complex
negotiations over evacuee status in which the letter of the law could be

and Independence, eds. D. A. Low and Howard Brasted (Armidale: Sage, 1998),
pp. 91–105.
48 49
National Herald, 4 April 1948. Dawn, 13 June 1952.
 Refugee Rehabilitation and the Predicament of Minorities 81

arbitrarily applied on the ground led to a particularly precarious position

for minorities, and especially those viewed as potential migrants.
In Indian states such as UP, this position changed over time, and par-
ticularly hardened in the late summer of 1948, following the reverse
migration of Muslims back to India: in August 1948, the UP Refugee
Department responded by suggesting that the words of the UP Evacuees
Administration of Property Act 1948, viz., ‘or intending to depart’
should replace the existing ‘or is preparing to depart’, and that its
coverage should be stricter so as to include those Muslims who had
returned after leaving on temporary permits.50
But such problems did not exist in a vacuum in either country. The
public sphere of discussion about refugees contrasted the movement and
the plight of refugees. In Indian newspapers, the large-scale traffic of
refugees from Sindh51 was placed directly alongside reports on the
restrictions of sales of Muslim property. To take just one instance, in
Saharanpur in West UP the district magistrate issued an order in April
1948 restricting Muslims from selling or letting to a non-Muslim any
property, whether movable or immovable, situated within the district
except under prior permission from the district magistrate. The order
was set out in highly legalistic language, being reported as ‘under Section
144 Cr PC’.52 The personal experiences of refugees were also juxtaposed
against the allegedly harsh treatment of evacuees leaving Pakistan for
India, and the possibility of retribution by search officers of Muslims.
Such articles and reports delved into the very personal world of migrants’
everyday ‘personal effects’ in the search by officers for arms.53
This public sphere of debate about refugees and migrants on the two
sides of the border had its starting point in inherent assumptions that
each country had about the other. In reporting on refugee issues, the
Indian press commonly commented on the situation in Pakistan as part
of a trans-Hindu idea of community sympathy. For Pakistani news-
papers, Muslims in India were equally members of a bigger transnational
community of believers, and by implication potential Pakistanis. Reports
in India at the end of December 1947 showed how the Karachi Congress

50
‘Memorandum of the First Meeting of the Prov Legislature for the Refugee
Department’, 30–31 August 1948, in ‘Refugee Standing Committee Proceedings’,
Relief and Rehabilitation, Box 23, File 341/48 UPSA.
51
‘3000 Non-Muslims Being Evacuated from Sind Every Day’, National Herald, 10 April
1948. See also, ‘Tees hazaar hindu sharannarthee ke Karachi mein sthiti gammir’, Aaj, 2
January 1948.
52
National Herald, 10 April 1948.
53
‘Searches of Persons Leaving Sind’, National Herald, 7 January 1948.
82 Refugees and Minorities in Uttar Pradesh and Sindh

Committee was alarmed about what it viewed as the indiscriminate

allotment and requisitioning of houses under the Rent Control Act and
the ‘wrongful making over’ of running business concerns to Muslim
refugees under Pakistan’s Rehabilitation Ordinance. The Congress
Committee had apparently ‘condemned the fact that Hindus have to stay
in their own houses locked up for fear of their appropriation’; and
denounced ‘the omnibus form that has to be filled’, which asked about
their income tax, value of property and reasons for why they should not
be ejected.54
The problem of accommodating refugees, and its attendant public
discussion, had its effect too on provincial governments. In India, it
pushed the UP government towards a hard policy vis-à-vis ambiguous
cases of Muslim evacuee property in certain instances, although this was
sometimes encouraged by central policies. By the summer of 1949,
official policy in UP, influenced by the centre, was to not allow individual
members of families to hold onto properties when the rest of the family
had migrated; if Muslims had, while in Pakistan, acquired property there,
they should be assumed to be evacuees from India, even if they had
returned.55 By then, the issue of temporary permits to Muslims who
wished to ‘return’ to India were used as a mechanism for marking them
as ‘intending’ and eventually permanent ‘evacuees’. Officers in the cen-
tral government advised provinces like UP on how to expedite the
control of their properties:
… we want to be fair in the administration of the law. We have no intention of
penalising the Muslim nationals of India. But the Pakistan Muslims cannot be
treated leniently. If the District Officer, after making summary enquiries, is
morally convinced that a person is an evacuee as defined by the law, that
person’s property must be taken over … We do not want long drawn out legal
proceedings, and have, for that reason, cut out all interference by the courts. If we
ourselves start entrusting the administration of the law not to administrators, but
to judicial officers, we shall be defeating the purpose of the Ordinance. Apart
from peculation and corruption that will spring up, proof will be exceedingly
difficult … We can’t allow people to just turn up and claim that they are not
evacuees but loyal Indian citizens, as has happened in Delhi. If he is not here, he
cannot turn up, and that is the best proof of his being an evacuee and his property
being evacuee property.56

54
‘Karachi Hindus Internees in the Homes: Terror of Forcible Occupation’, National
Herald, 1 January 1948.
55
Notes from the discussion by Shri R. P. Varma with the Custodian General, Relief and
Rehabilitation (A), Box 41, File 553/49 UPSA.
56
V. D. Dantyagi to Bhagwan Sahay, ‘Administration of Evacuee Property in UP’,
27 August 1949, Relief and Rehabilitation, Box 41, File 552/49 UPSA.
 Refugee Rehabilitation and the Predicament of Minorities 83

There were, however, two further complications in UP, which illustrated

the gulf between formal policy and quotidian realities. On the one hand, the
practical implementation of evacuee property ordinances meant discrimin-
ation towards claims on the basis of religion – with Muslims being auto-
matically required to prove that they were not evacuees. A notification was
established, preventing sale of properties, which clearly targeted Muslims.
Here there was clear disagreement in the Central government between two
secretaries, V. D. Dantyagi and C. N. Chandra, on how this should be
interpreted. The latter took a relatively liberal approach as we will see
below. In contrast, Dantyagi suggested to provincial governments that
‘notifications may be issued under this Section prohibiting transfers of
immovable property without the prior consent of the Collector in areas
where a good deal of Muslim property is situated’. Permission could
certainly be granted by the Collector as a matter of course where the seller
was a non-Muslim. But where the seller was a Muslim it was necessary ‘to
investigate the facts … to see whether the sale is being effected with a view
to migrate to Pakistan or transfer the sale proceeds to that Country’.57 Such
an approach was, however, ultra vires of section 298 of the (then)
Constitution Act, which stated that no distinction could be made between
various nationals on the ground of religion or place of birth and so forth.
These particular observations, ironically, were made in a file entitled ‘issue
of notification banning transfer of immovable property of Muslims [italics
added]’.58 On the other hand, in truth, the administration of property, its
sale and claims to its possession was extraordinarily messy and open to
abuse. The UP Custodian of Evacuee Property summed up the difficulties
of implementing what he termed a ‘fair’ approach:
From the administrative point of view it is quite impossible to subject the entire
population of the United Provinces to the rigours of section 26 notification which
will require every person transferring immovable property to obtain a certificate
from the District Magistrate. Floodgates of corruption will be opened, there
would be endless cases of delays and the public already harassed with the
interference of State in so many aspects of life will consider all this another
source of harassment.59
As this comment suggests, there certainly was scope to get around the
changing rules on evacuee property, particularly since proceedings under

57
V. D. Dantyagi to Chief Secretaries to Provincial Governments, ‘Issue of Notification
Banning Transfer of Immovable Property of Muslims’, 26 July 1949, Relief and
Rehabilitation Department, Box 40, File 514/49 UPSA.
58
Note of 21/9/49, ‘Issue of Notification Banning Transfer of Immovable Property of
Muslims’, Relief and Rehabilitation Department, ibid.
59
Note of 22 September 1949, ibid.
84 Refugees and Minorities in Uttar Pradesh and Sindh

the evacuee property ordinance were not declared as ‘judicial’ and there-
fore often under the executive authority of individual officers. Moreover,
such was the scale of work involved that, by mid-1949, the Refugee
Department in UP reported that it was unable to cope, with some
officers reportedly unable to understand the provisions of the UP Land
Acquisition (Rehabilitation and Refugees) Act of 1948.60 Reports from
refugee organizations and their sponsors poured in to the authorities,
for instance from the Sindhi Panchayat in western UP, alleging that
Muslims were continuing to dispose of property ‘illegally’. Meanwhile,
the district magistrates of areas not originally included in the notifica-
tion of control of properties also called for inclusion, suggesting that the
personal views and opinions of individual administrators could deter-
mine the scope and reach of the policy and its effects on Muslims. For
instance, J. N. Goel, Budaun’s district magistrate, argued that there
were ‘many Muslim properties’ in his district and that many of the
families had ‘connections in Pakistan’.61 Naturally, it was possible for
those with the right connections then to influence the mind of officers.
C. N. Chandra, secretary to the Government in Delhi, described one
such process:
a practice appears to have grown up in some places of the parties to an enquiry
under the evacuee legislation bringing letters either from office holders or well-
known public organizations or from other highly placed gentlemen, addressed
to the officer holding the enquiry or an officer to whom an appeal from the
decision of the enquiring officer will lie, containing statement of fact or
expressions of opinion having a direct or indirect bearing on the subject
matter of the enquiry. Although in most cases the writers of these letters
themselves possibly do not mean it, there can be little doubt that the party
who secures such letters wants them to influence the judgement of the officer to
whom they are addressed.62
Equally, the plight of new refugees in some of the major UP towns did
not necessarily fit neatly into existing rehabilitation plans. In early 1950,
observers, such as Prakashvati Sood from Meerut, reported that new-
comers were often not welcome, since they were held responsible for
disturbing the ‘peace and business’ of the town.63 Refugees often

60
‘Staff PLAO Lucknow’, Relief and Rehabilitation, Box 20, File 299 (5)/48 UPSA.
61
J. N. Goel, district magistrate and deputy custodian, Budaun District to Secretary to
Government, R and R (a) UP, 18 August 1949, Relief and Rehabilitation Department,
Box 40, File 514/49 UPSA.
62
C. N. Chandra, Secretary to Government of India to Chief Secretaries All Prov.
Governments, 12 September 1949, ibid.
63
‘Standing Committee – Relief and Rehabilitation Dept., 5th Meeting on September 30
1950’, Relief and Rehabilitation, Box 54, File 154/50 UPSA.
 Refugee Rehabilitation and the Predicament of Minorities 85

attempted to negotiate rents down, the construction of houses through

cooperative societies was not very successful, refugee loans were being
‘misused’64 and when facilities and settlements began to fill up in western
UP, there was a general resistance on the part of refugees to move to
districts in the east of the province.65
The same kind of official announcements about policies towards
refugee rehabilitation were issued in Pakistan, though often rebutted
by groups representing refugee interests, whose complaints were given
publicity in the pro-refugee press. Numerous instances dating from the
late 1940s provide an indication of the extent of frustration there with
the state’s failure to accommodate refugee demands. In many of them,
the position of the refugees concerned was framed in relation to non-
Muslims whether the latter had left for India or remained in Pakistan.
Accommodation there, as in UP, was a recurrent source of complaint:
as one report complaining about the allotment of evacuee property in
Karachi asserted, ‘Thousands of premises have been vacated by Hindu
evacuees since January 6th [1948]. But the officers of the Rehabilitation
Department and the rent controller have been evading to allot them
[sic] to the refugees and the government servants’, resulting in ‘Hard-
ships to Refugees’.66 And when property had been allotted, grievances
did not necessarily cease. In 1949, the Hyderabad district magistrate
informed refugees under his jurisdiction that they were ‘not liable’ to
pay the arrears of the electricity charges due from their allotted prop-
erty’s former Hindu occupants: ‘In connection with the representation
made by the present Muslim occupants of the Hindu evacuee houses,
that the Hyderabad (Sind) Electric Supply Company were recovering
arrears due from the evacuee Hindus, from them, Government have
declared such recoveries unlawful’.67 The same went for employment.
Under a headline that asserted that ‘Muslims [are] still being replaced
by Hindus in Sind Schools’, refugees in Larkhana, Upper Sindh,
pointed out the ‘glaring instance’ of its Government High School: ‘In
this institution 23 Muslim refugee teachers had been appointed of
which only three are left. All the remaining have been replaced by
Hindu teachers who have been imported back to Sind, many without
their families’.68

64
Ibid.
65
‘Proceedings of the Meeting of the Standing Committee, Relief and Rehabilitation
Department, Council House, Lucknow, September 3, 1949’.
66 67 68
Dawn, 9 March 1948. Dawn, 10 April 1949. Dawn, 23 October 1948.
86 Refugees and Minorities in Uttar Pradesh and Sindh

Representing Refugees/Demonizing Minorities

For those with the financial, organizational or social connections, there
were certainly means by which new arrivals in India or Pakistan could
further their interests. Among other strategies, the plight of refugees was,
as others have shown in different contexts,69 represented to higher ech-
elons of government by deputations of refugee organizations in both
India and Pakistan. For instance, in the first week of January 1948, a
deputation of refugees from Lucknow travelled to meet Patel in Delhi to
present a range of demands, which included complaints about the inad-
equacy of government loans for starting small businesses.70 Deputations
were also an effective way of drawing attention to the difficulties faced by
refugees in Pakistan as well as highlighting what they expected of the state
and its representatives. Karachi, as home to the federal authorities, was
the main centre of this activity, and a steady stream of deputations made
their way to the offices and homes of leading politicians located there. In
late April 1948, for instance, a group of representatives of the Jamiat-i-
Muhajireen in Pakistan, headed by the leading refugee cleric Maulana
Shabir Ahmad Usmani, handed over a detailed memorandum on refugee
problems to the prime minister. Apart from wanting to be recognized as
the ‘sole refugee organization for Pakistan’ that would advise on ‘all
activities of the Government in connection with the refugees’, it
demanded that the entire complement of houses, land, shops and other
property left by Hindus be reserved for refugees, who would also take the
place of Hindus in representative bodies, from local district councils to
the highest legislature of the land. In response, Liaquat Ali Khan assured
the deputation’s members that their recommendations and suggestions
would be given full consideration by his government.71
Local community groups likewise often made their feelings known
through written petitions. In July 1952, residents of the Pakistan Housing
Colony in Karachi did precisely this when they submitted an impas-
sioned memorandum to the Pakistani prime minister drawing his atten-
tion to deplorable conditions prevailing there. As this explained, if no
effective measures were taken by the authorities immediately, then some
13,000 refugees would be forced to leave their new homes: ‘Walls and

69
See, for instance, Zamindar, The Long Partition; Uditi Sen, ‘Dissident Memories:
Exploring Bengali Refugee Narratives in the Andaman Islands’, in Refugees and the End
of Empire: Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration during the Twentieth Century, eds.
Panikos Panayi and Pippa Virdee (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 219–44;
Uditi Sen, Citizen Refugee: Forging the Indian Nation after Partition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2018).
70 71
National Herald, 8 January 1948. Dawn, 1 May 1948.
 Refugees/Demonizing Minorities 87

roofs [had] started cracking soon after they were built because of rotten
material used by the company responsible for construction. … There
[had been] no arrangements so far for construction of sanitation’ and the
colony was ‘developing fast into a new slum’.72
But responses varied in terms of the vocal support from politicians that
such petitions secured. In Pakistan, during the years immediately
following Independence, the central government was dominated by pol-
iticians who had played a leading role in the pre-August 1947 Muslim
League and often hailed from places that now lay in India thanks to
Partition. Their sympathies at least often tended to lie with refugees and
their representatives. It was a different situation at the provincial level,
such as in Sindh where ministries fluctuated in terms of their support for
central policies on refugee resettlement and rehabilitation. This stance
was epitomized by the reluctance of the then chief minister of Sindh
Khuhro to accept large numbers of refugees sent southwards from West
Punjab in 1948 to relieve pressure on resources there. Later, his adminis-
tration attempted to deter new refugees from UP from crossing the
Indian border in 1952–3.73
In UP, meanwhile, the support of politicians for refugee organizations,
like those that were active in Sindh, could be linked to underlying ideas
and presumptions about emigrants (by and large Muslims) and specific-
ally their place within ‘national culture’ and Indian citizenship. Central
to this process was the dissolution, by May 1948, of the UP Muslim
League Parliamentary Board; the end of separate electorates on the basis
of religious community and the push by some of the UP Congress
leadership, encouraging Muslim leaders to effect a change in ‘attitude’
of their rank-and-file constituencies.74 However, this process of ‘attitude’
change took place in palpable ways around the movement of people
across the border and their appeal to the leadership. A crucial figure in
this respect was P. D. Tandon, leading politician on the right wing of the
Congress. As a leader who linked province to centre (he later became
president of the Congress and was a rival to Nehru in 1949–50), Tandon
operated as a focal point for the publicity surrounding refugees. For
Tandon, assimilation into a high caste majoritarian view of national
culture ultimately foregrounded what he believed to be the ‘problem’ of
Pakistan. Tandon, therefore, made for an ideal figure to patronize and
support organizations such as the All India Refugee Association (AIRA),
a Sindhi-dominated lobbying body active in UP that was headed by

72
Dawn, 1 July 1952. 73
Ansari, ‘Partition, Migration and Refugees’.
74
Gyanesh Kudaisya, Region, Nation, “Heartland”: Uttar Pradesh in India’s Body Politic
(New Delhi: Sage, 2006), pp. 362–6.
88 Refugees and Minorities in Uttar Pradesh and Sindh

Choitram P. Gidwani.75 The AIRA developed out of refugee agitations

for compensation, especially via evacuee property, and was galvanized by
movements such as the ‘Evacuee Property Day’ and direct lobbying of
the Prime Minister’s Office. It regarded Tandon as a prime supporter,
and, according to Gidwani, while ‘the rehabilitation policy of the Gov-
ernment’ was critiqued as ‘totally inadequate’, Tandon provided hope.76
The AIRA also sought Tandon’s help in rent disputes,77 and in prevent-
ing the recovery of income tax demands issued on Sindhi refugees by the
Pakistani authorities.78 Indeed, Tandon’s stance on refugees and
Muslim properties was a fundamental dynamic of his dispute with Nehru
himself, and the AIRA spared no ire in denouncing Nehru as a man
whose ‘culture’ was Muslim and who showed too much open ‘appease-
ment’ of Pakistan.79 In 1950, the Sindhi Hindu Refugee Panchayat,
based in Durgapur Camp, Jaipur, wrote to Tandon for help in preventing
Muslims from selling and mortgaging properties in Rajasthan. The Pan-
chayat provided lists of Muslim government servants who had retained
properties but migrated, or who had ‘deceived refugees’.80 In 1950,
Tandon presided over the All India Refugee Conference in Delhi, at
which Gidwani complained of the inadequacy of refugee loans, suggested
that evacuee property laws had failed to prevent a ‘drain of crores of
rupees from India to Pakistan’ and charged the Jamiat-ul-Ulama with
agitating against the ordinance. Gidwani summed up his list of accus-
ations with the doubt that ‘elements returning to India [in the main from
Sindh] who have breathed the poisonous atmosphere of Pakistan will
ever remain loyal to our country’.81

75
Gidwani, who hailed from Mirpurkhas in Lower Sindh, had been president of the Sindh
Provincial Congress prior to Independence, and hosted Subhas Chandra Bose on the
latter’s visit to the province in 1935, just before it separated from Bombay Presidency.
See Sidney Sawyier, ‘Dail Gidwani – An Odyssey of His Own’, Sindishaan 6, 4
(October–December 2007), pp. 14–24.
76
Choitram P. Gidwani, All India Refugee Association to Tandon, 15 January 1951,
Tandon Papers, File 183 National Archives of India (hereafter NAI).
77
Choitram P. Gidwani, All India Refugee Association to Tandon, 23 July 1952, Tandon
Papers, File 301 NAI.
78
Statement of the Displaced Income-tax Payers’ Association, New Delhi. Draft
Resolutions of the All India Refugee Conference, 29–30 July 1950, Tandon Papers,
File 301 NAI.
79
All India Refugee Conference, 29–30 July 1950, General Comments on the Resolutions,
Tandon Papers, File 301 NAI.
80
From representatives of the Sindhi Hindu Refugee Panchayat, Jaipur, Durgapur Camp,
Gopaldas H. Ladhani, Congress Social Worker, to Tandon, 29 January 1950, Tandon
Papers, File 301 NAI.
81
Speech of Dr. Choithram P. Gidwani, Chairman Reception Committee, All India
Refugee Conference, Delhi, 29–30 July 1950, Tandon Papers, File 134 NAI.
 Refugees/Demonizing Minorities 89

Other correspondents to Tandon requested help in acquiring

evacuee property, such as one P. R. Kishanchand – a self-declared
‘man of status’ – also originally from Sindh, who wanted assistance with
acquiring a shop in Kanpur in 1952;82 or the District Refugee Corpor-
ation in Jhansi that sent a letter of complaint about a rationing officer
(B. R. Sharma) and the inadequacy of his call for tenders for evacuee
properties.83 This led to a host of other smaller colonies of displaced
persons seeking Tandon’s help, including the poorly provisioned
Lajpatnagar Panchayat Settlement near Delhi that requested a training
or work centre.84 Supporting Hindu refugee organizations so visibly also
meant that Tandon became a forum of partisan complaints about alleged
‘Muslim’ brutality. His private papers are littered with accounts of such
excesses, suggesting that even had he wanted a balanced account of the
violence, he was unlikely to have received it.85 In extension of this
patronage, Tandon was targeted by members of the RSS calling to be
reinstated in government service following the ban on the organization
triggered by Gandhi’s assassination, including one missive from a Sindhi
migrant looking for work and help for his son who had been jailed as an
RSS member.86 In another appeal letter, contrasts were drawn between
the apparent ‘tolerance’ being shown to ‘Pakistani’ Muslims as compared
to what RSS loyalists were receiving.87 Others contacting Tandon sought
support for their complaints against Muslim government servants in
Delhi and UP.88 Later, Tandon even provided a sympathetic voice for
the likes of Baburao Patel, a columnist who wrote a strongly anti-Muslim
critique of the Pakistani documentary Josh-i-Jehad (The Passion of
Religious Crusade) that appeared in Film India in March 1952.89
Being made Speaker of the UP Assembly in 1948 did not deter
Tandon from publicly expressing his views in official settings. If the
Socialists supported the language of Hindustani (that incorporated many

82
P. R. Kishanchand to Tandon, 19 December 1952, Tandon Papers, File 128 NAI.
83
District Refugee Cooperative Society to B. R. Sharma, TRO cum R and R Officer,
9 January 1950, Tandon Papers, File 119 NAI.
84
Lajpatnagar Panchayat Statement, n.d., Tandon Papers, File 301 NAI.
85
For instance, Statement of S. S. Bhasin, of district Campbellpur, 22 August 1947 (at
present taking shelter under the roof of Arya Samaj, Old Hospital Road, Jammu),
Tandon Papers, File 29, NAI. This letter described Hindu deaths near Wazirabad.
86
L. H. Ajwani, Prof. of English, Sind College, Karachi to Tandon, 21 November 1947,
Tandon Papers, File 29 NAI.
87
S. No. 734, S. C. Sharma, Tundla to Tandon, 24 July 1950, Tandon Papers, File
28 NAI.
88
‘The responsible citizens of Ghaziabad’ to Tandon, 21 September 1947, Tandon Papers,
File 29 NAI.
89
Baburao Patel to M. I. Quadri [sic], 24 March 1952, Tandon Papers, File 11 NAI.
90 Refugees and Minorities in Uttar Pradesh and Sindh

Urdu words associated with UP Muslims),90 he claimed in one public

declaration in the spring of 1948, this meant that they backed the Muslim
League’s Two-Nation theory, which he held responsible for India’s
Partition. The country’s salvation, for Tandon, lay instead in everyone
having ‘one culture and civilization’. Muslims, therefore, he believed,
had to ‘own the Indian culture and civilization like they have done in
China’. Tandon’s view of Hinduism, however, was largely assimilationist
and in some ways not dissimilar to the late colonial Hindu revivalist
organization, the Arya Samaj in UP. Partition, Tandon told the UP
Assembly in 1948, was due to the past sins of Hindus and if they did
not open the doors of Hinduism to Muslims, they would experience even
worse grief.91 Earlier at an open session of the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan
held in Bombay in December 1947, and attended by among others V. D.
Savarkar (former leader of the ultra-nationalist Hindu Mahasabha),
Tandon had suggested that there was still an attempt to satisfy Muslims
in relation to the national language, and that in the past that British had
encouraged the idea that Muslim culture was different. At that same
meeting, Seth Govind Das argued that while Muslims were voicing
their loyalty to the Indian Union, they continued to follow the same old
policy; if they did not want to show loyalty, then they should go to
Pakistan.92
But it was not just the likes of Tandon and (famously) Patel93 who
picked up on and ran with the theme of Muslim (dis)loyalty in the years
following Independence. Demand for loyalty in post-Independence
India was a political device. G. B. Pant, in a January 1948 election
meeting at Lucknow’s famous Aminuduallah Park, proposed that ‘if
the Muslims persisted in their old ways, a Hindu raj would be inevitable’.
Put another way, if Muslims desired to be one with non-Muslims, he

90
For a brief survey of the immediate post-independence promotion of Hindi and the
deliberate marginalization of Urdu in UP among ministerial figures including G. B. Pant
and Sampurnanand, see Kudaisya, Region, Nation, “Heartland”, pp. 368–80. The
promotion of Hindustani related to a section of the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan in the
late colonial period, who favoured the idea of a national vernacular which embraced
vocabulary drawn from Urdu. This group opposed those in the Sammelan, such as
Tandon and Sampurnanand who argued for a ‘pure’ and more sanskritized Hindi. See
Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age
of Nationalism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009).
91
‘Maintain Ethical Standard in Elections: Speaker Tandon’s Plea’, National Herald, 20
April 1948.
92
‘Sammelan Demands Hindi in Devanagri as Lingua Franca’, National Herald, 1
January 1948.
93
References to Patel’s comments in Lucknow and an accompanying cartoon of him
shaking a Muslim whose mouth has been padlocked can be found in National Herald,
8 January 1948.
 Refugees/Demonizing Minorities 91

argued, they should vote for the Congress candidate, reiterating the well-
established mantra of Muslims having to prove their loyalty and how
ultimately they could win over the goodwill of the majority by honestly
supporting the Congress.94 This sort of rhetoric undoubtedly could have
an effect on the ground. In Shahjahanpur during district board elections,
for instance, Damodar Swarup Seth maintained that villagers were
threatened with imprisonment, if they dared to vote for socialists:
according to him ‘there appeared to be an organized effort in every
district by the district authorities through the police and other agencies
to threaten the Muslims as a whole that they would be sent to Pakistan if
they failed to vote for the Congress candidates’.95 Unsurprisingly, the
General Secretary of the Hindu Mahasabha in Kanpur, Ashutosh Lahiri,
contended in a public speech in early 1948 that the loyalty of Union
Muslims was still in doubt:96 and in Bijnor ‘it was said that if the Muslims
did not vote for the Congress, they would be considered disloyal to the
Government’, while a parallel situation was reported in Gorakhpur.97
The same line of questioning took place in relation to where – terri-
torially – the loyalty of minorities in Pakistan lay after August 1947,
amplified by high-profile scandals exposing the allegedly ‘treacherous’
or anti-state actions of influential or well-placed individuals. In late
September 1948, the personal assistant to the then Sindh Chief Minister
Pir Ilahi Bux was detained by Karachi Airport Customs as he was about
to leave for India by the afternoon Indian National Airways flight to
Delhi. Once he had been handed over to the police, reports alleged that
Pasaram had been carrying with him confidential documents relating to
trucks, motor cars, jeeps, important bridges and other strategic positions
that required special defence measures in the province.98 At a public
meeting held in the city’s Eidgah Maidan after Friday prayers the
following day, a number of refugee speakers – with their own complaints
as far as the Sindh political setup was concerned – described the provin-
cial government as the patron of fifth columnists, corrupt officials and
murderers, and called upon the federal authorities to take over Sindh’s
administration immediately.99 Letters in that day’s Dawn newspaper also
expressed concerns about non-Muslims in other strategic posts in the
wake of the Pasaram scandal: ‘If Indian Government can make it a matter

94
‘Vote for Congress Candidate to Prove Your Bona Fides’: Pandit Pant’s Plea to City’s
Muslim Electorate’, National Herald, 8 January 1948.
95
National Herald, 25 April 1948.
96
‘No Change in Attitude of Union Muslims’, National Herald, 9 January 1948.
97
National Herald, 19 April 1948.
98
‘Hindu PA of Sind Premier Arrested at Drigh Road’, Dawn, 1 October 1948.
99
‘Taking over of Sind Administration by Centre Demanded’, Dawn, 5 October 1948.
92 Refugees and Minorities in Uttar Pradesh and Sindh

of policy not to post non-Hindus at key posts, why can’t we?’, asked one
correspondent.100 Dawn, famously pro-refugee and (on the whole) loyal
supporter of the central Pakistani authorities, periodically published
other reports of non-Muslim officers apparently decamping at short
notice to India, along the lines of ‘Mr. Govind Ram, Mukhtarkar, at
Sukkur, who was entrusted with the distribution of cloth to flood
sufferers, it is learnt, suddenly absconded to India on September 2,
taking with him a large number of government papers’.101 This kind of
negative coverage prompted at least some Sindhi Hindus to seek to
pledge their loyalty publicly to Pakistan. As one such deputation, in its
written memorandum presented to the governor of Sindh that same
month, explained:
We want to be assimilated in the Pakistan State in a way so that we may cease to
be regarded as a minority and live a free and honourable existence [… we] should
be permitted to sail in the same boat with the majority so as to sink or swim with
them.102

Marking Evacuees: Property and Its Control between

India and Pakistan
The pivotal ‘goods’ that underpinned both refugee rehabilitation and the
uncertain status of evacuees was property, both housing and business. In
UP, much of the tension was linked to property being forcibly removed
from Muslim hands, whether its owners had permanently migrated to
Pakistan or not.103 In contrast, in Sindh the problem in late 1947 and
early 1948 – from a minority standpoint at least – lay in individuals not
being permitted to dispose of property as they wished prior to their
scheduled departure to India. But in both localities, as we have already
begun to see, property represented a vital transmission mode in the
interaction between government action (in the form of ordinances and
other legislation) and popular ideas of an individual’s ‘constitutional’
rights.
In UP, there was a fairly rapid turnover of legislation from the 1948 UP
Evacuees Administration of Property Act, which applied to sixteen

100
Ibid.
101
‘Hindu Officer Absconds with Sind Government’s Papers and Rs. 70,000’, Dawn, 26
October 1948.
102
‘Sind Hindus Pledge Loyalty to Pakistan’, Dawn, 26 October 1948.
103
For explorations of what this confiscation meant in relation to people’s lives, see
Zamindar, The Long Partition, and Khan, The Great Partition.
 Property and Its Control between India and Pakistan 93

districts in the western part of the state,104 to the 1949 United Provinces
Administration of Evacuee Property Ordinance and then the central
Administration of Evacuee Property Act of 1950. The 1949 Ordinance,
passed early that year, widened the definition of ‘intending evacuee’
compared with the preceding 1948 Act. By 1949, the designation had
expanded to cover the following categories: first, someone who might
have left or might leave the Indian Union even without the fear of
communal disturbances for any place in Pakistan; second, a person
who resided in Pakistan and who was unable personally to manage or
supervise his/her property or whose property was being managed by an
‘unauthorized person’: and third, an acquisition of any interest in prop-
erty in Pakistan, irrespective of where the person resided. Most notably,
the jurisdiction of the civil courts was barred for objections against the
authorities’ decisions; courts could not question the legality of their
actions and rights of appeal were considerably restricted.105
These executive powers were particularly noteworthy given that the
1949 Ordinance prevented the sale of properties without the approval of
the state government, with special focus on Muslims who had to seek
the permission of a district magistrate (who acted as deputy custodians).
In practice, this measure proved to be a very rough instrument for
dealing with the wide array of possibilities surrounding evacuee property.
In 1952, an Administration of Evacuee Property Amendment Bill was
passed, which liberalized the terms on which some evacuee property
could be restored and which, critically, omitted chapter IV covering
‘intending evacuees’.106 Furthermore, this omission was itself, some
contemporaries claimed, part of a wider attempt being undertaken by
the Government of India to settle Pakistan’s objections to this categoriza-
tion of Muslims.107 However, it led to a protest reaction from V. G.
Deshpande of the Hindu Mahasabha and others in Congress itself,
including Sucheta Kripalani, who believed that refugee organizations
should have been consulted.108 In due course, further amendments
followed in 1953, 1956 and 1960, intended to overcome various practical
problems in its implementation, including the recovery of rents and

104
The districts were Dehradun, Saharanpur, Jhansi, Meerut, Muzaffarnagar, Bulandshar,
Aligarh, Mathura, Basti, Nainital, Agra, Mainpuri, Etah, Moradabad, Bijnor and
Garhwal.
105
Enclosure V ‘The United Provinces Administration of Evacuee Property Ordinance
1949’, in ‘Third Meeting of the Standing Committee’, Relief and Rehabilitation,
Box 12, File 235/49 UPSA.
106
D. R. Kohli to all State Governments, 17 May 1952, ‘1950 Evacuee Property Act’,
Relief and Rehabilitation, Box 35, File 756 UPSA.
107 108
Note of N. Sharma, 6 September 1952, ibid. The Pioneer, 6 November 1952.
94 Refugees and Minorities in Uttar Pradesh and Sindh

damages from occupants of properties (Section 10A), the separating out

of the interests of evacuees from non-evacuees with interests in a prop-
erty (Section 10(2)) and the recovery and return of property ‘wrongly
declared’ as evacuee property (Section 27).109
There was a substantial difference between the provisions of both the
Ordinance and the Act, and their implementation, however. A great deal
of power and initiative was ultimately handed down to each locality – files
in the UP archives on the ‘Standing Committee’ set up to provide advice
on refugees are surprisingly thin. In addition, while the government
could only pay for staff and other costs involved in dealing with evacuee
property issues from rents received from evacuee property itself,110
officials evidently proved quite ineffective in securing rents, and were
as a consequence faced with repeated protests from refugee
organizations (as testified by the letters sent to Tandon, discussed
earlier). Over and above everything else, any compensation for proper-
ties lost by evacuees was not settled due to the failure of India and
Pakistan to agree on a settlement (particularly in relation to provisions
set out in the Karachi settlement of January 1949) throughout the early
1950s.111 Many Partition migrants found themselves literally at the
mercy of (failed) bilateral agreements.
Equally, given the complex nature of the evacuee property rules, there
were practical ways for migrants to evade the loss of property. In June
1948, officials in UP, as compared with other Indian states, were more
urgently attempting to find accommodation for refugees. This resulted
from the return of UP Muslims who had originally sought refuge in
Pakistan but now wanted to resume their old lives – together with their
former properties and jobs – in India. The authorities identified that in
fact many Muslim owners had left houses in possession of relatives or
friends,112 and were also protected via connections to local administra-
tors; therefore, as Govind Sahai, a UP minister, explained at the time:
They have no use for these vacant houses but are only keeping a semblance of
occupation with the sole objective of preventing the allotments of these houses to

109
‘1950 Evacuee Property Act’, Relief and Rehabilitation, Box 35, File 756 UPSA.
110
‘Resume of the Activities of the Relief and Rehabilitation Department, Uttar Pradesh’,
‘Second Meeting to Advise on Refugees’, Relief and Rehabilitation, Box 62, File 41/
49 UPSA.
111
‘Statement by Shri Ajit Prasad Jain, Minister for Rehabilitation on recent negotiations
with Pakistan on Evacuee Property’, ‘1950 Evacuee Property Act’, Relief and
Rehabilitation, Box 35, File 756 UPSA.
112
Bhagwat Prasad Singh, Secretary of the Congress Committee, Nagina, to Govind
Sahai, UP Parliamentary Secretary, Lucknow, 14 July 1948, ‘Requisitioning of
Building Lying Vacant for the Purpose of Housing Refugees’, Relief and
Rehabilitation, Box 1, File 265/1948 UPSA.
 Property and Its Control between India and Pakistan 95

the refugees. Apart from ordinary houses many big and palatial buildings are thus
held up from being utilized. Some Hindus – big house owners – have also
adopted the same tactics. Local officials are also at times helpless to prevent
such mischief on account of personal contacts … I feel that the indignation of
refugees over this matter has now come to such a pitch that an explosion might be
expected any moment.113
The administration for evacuee property was headed by a ‘Custodian’ for
each Indian state. In UP, the first official appointed to this post was
Raghunath Prasad Varma, a member of the judicial branch of the PCS,
with district magistrates acting as his ‘deputies’. However, the key bur-
eaucrats involved in ascertaining and preparing lists of evacuee property
were TROs. It was significant that these officers were also involved in the
control of rationing, food and civil supply around which there were a
range of corruption scandals.114 They were then in turn supported by an
extensive field staff.
Whether or not individual officers did act in a corrupt manner (and
there were many times when this happened), or how far influence was
brought to bear on them, the reality was often less important than the
belief that this behaviour was thought to be taking place. Such rumours
created expectations that alternative informal approaches should be
used. Varma’s instructions around properties, for instance, suggested
the importance of hearsay and speculation, as the following 1949 directive
indicated: ‘there have been transfers of evacuee property on a rather
extensive scale and that such transfers still continue to be effected. While
it is possible that these reports are very much exaggerated … still I am to
impress on you the necessity of taking suitable measures to check such
transfers, if they are taking place in your district’.115 As this guidance
suggests, misappropriation by officers was tacitly known about, and so to
prevent corruption, field staff were required to deposit an equal amount
to the rents they received on a typical day from tenants of evacuee
property.116 The Director of Cottage Industries in the UP, who had the
authority to distribute loans and controlled goods to refugees, boasted,
‘In distributing this controlled material (iron and steel), this office has

113
Note of Govind Sahai, 1 June 1948, in ‘Requisitioning of Building Lying Vacant for the
Purpose of Housing Refugees’, Relief and Rehabilitation, Box 1, File 265/1948 UPSA.
114
For more discussion on this theme, see Chapter 3.
115
Shri Raghunath Prasad Varma, Custodian, Evacuee Property to all District Magistrates,
26 July 1949, in ‘Instruction Regarding Taking Over and Preparation of Lists of
Evacuee Property’, Rehabilitation and Relief (A), Box 2, File 501/49(A) UPSA.
116
Sri Manmohan Kishan, Asst. Secretary to the Govt. of India to all Part ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’
States, ‘Collection of Rent of Evacuee Property through Field Staff – Instructions
Regarding’, 29 October 1951, Relief and Rehabilitation, Box 23, File 308/
1951 UPSA.
96 Refugees and Minorities in Uttar Pradesh and Sindh

earned a fair name and it has been rarely that the allottees have been
found guilty of black-marketing and the like offences’.117
Then again, migrants to UP who were unable to access property via
normal channels could also take advantage of complex rules, delays and
uncertainties in the evacuee property administration. In reality, the allot-
ment of properties to refugees was regularly anticipated by squatting or
forcible occupation. In reply to a UP government circular of early Janu-
ary 1949, the Allahabad district magistrate pointed out that whereas no
houses had been requisitioned up to that point, refugees in local towns
had already taken possession of twenty-six properties that had previously
belonged to Muslims.118 Perhaps not unexpectedly, seizing property
illegally, especially houses supplied with facilities, was viewed as prefer-
able to waiting for allocated housing. The city of Kanpur had an exten-
sive programme of tenement building for refugees – 2,200 single-roomed
and 600 double-roomed tenements and 500 shops, to be paid for from a
total budget of around Rs. 10,000 million.119 However, the reality was
less positive: as a deputation from the Friends Colony Association in
Kanpur to the UP government in August 1954, following completion of
the housing complex, complained, the rent of ‘A type quarters’ (allegedly
the tenements of the highest quality) was very high even though there was
no electricity supply, tenants had to deposit three months’ rent in
advance, there was no outer compound wall for security and no proper
drainage for flats on the first floor.120
In Sindh, the problems of implementation were not always identical in
nature. But as we will see below, in terms of how citizens interacted with
the local state, there were some important similarities around
how rumour informed social behaviours, especially concerning supposed
administrative corruption. In the view of its critics there, the proposed
Economic Rehabilitation Bill that was under discussion in 1948 fell far
short of expectations. In February 1948 (before the city of Karachi had

117
‘Rehabilitation Brochure – Letters Issued to DMs etc.’ Relief and Rehabilitation,
Box 447, File 467/50(a) UPSA.
118
Bhagwan Sahay to Dwarka Prasad Singh, district magistrate, Gorakhpur, 23 August
1948, Relief and Rehabilitation, Box 1, File 265/1948 UPSA.
119
To make a comparison with other cities in UP, Kanpur’s was an ambitious building
programme. One hundred tenements and forty-eight shops were built in Saharanpur
and fifty houses and forty-eight shops were built in Lucknow. S. R. Das, IAS to the
Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of Rehabilitation, New Delhi, 14 March
1952, in ‘Construction by state PWD for displaced persons in Kanpur 1952–53’, Relief
and Rehabilitation, Box 2, File 143 (5)/52 UPSA.
120
Deputation of Friends Colony Association, Swaroop Nagar, Kanpur, 25 August 1954,
in ‘Construction by State PWD for Displaced Persons in Kanpur 1952–1953’, Relief
and Rehabilitation, Box 2, File 143 (5)/52 UPSA.
 Property and Its Control between India and Pakistan 97

been detached administratively from Sindh in April that year), the Sindh
Legislative Assembly (SLA) debated the difficulties involved in the eco-
nomic rehabilitation of the province’s swelling refugee population, with
Hindu members rejecting the Sindh government’s attempt to regulate
retrospectively the buying and selling of evacuee property, and in par-
ticular empowering rehabilitation officers to intervene to decide whether
or not such transactions were valid. Much of the discussion revolved
around the term ‘bona fide’, and its possible replacement with what those
advocating the amendment preferred as a more precise reference –
namely ‘according to the law in force and for adequate consideration’ –
which in their view would reduce the discretion, and potential discrimin-
ation, available to government officials. As one Hindu member of the
Assembly Holaram H. Keswani maintained, ‘A person should have his
right of ownership even though he is living in a foreign country. He must
have the right of selling his property, and that property can be sold freely
through his own attorney or by his coming over here according to the law
of the land … [which] is being absolutely destroyed here’. In addition, ‘to
penalize the transfers so far made by persons who have migrated or even
by persons who have not migrated and who want to remain here’ would
put ‘impediments’ in the way of people ‘who are migrating from Sind and
are anxious to sell their property in the open market’.121
According to another SLA minority member, Sirumal Vishindas, the
declared policy of the government had always been to persuade Sindhi
Hindus to remain, but
if anybody wants to go away, they shall give him all facilities. Therefore those
persons who want to sell the property in the open market should not be
prohibited from doing so and no impediment should be placed in their way …
the case of the Hindus who want to go is absolutely pitiable. Their moveable
property cannot be sold … anybody who sells the moveable property is put in
jail.122
Vishindas then proceeded to detail the problems faced by minorities in
his hometown of Larkana in Upper Sindh: ‘You do not allow them [non-
Muslims] to sell their property and pay their debts and go away … you
ask them to leave the property in the hands of Government Officers, but
you do not permit them to discharge their debts’.123 In response, chief
minister Khuhro dismissed complaints of possible official interference as
exaggerated. More generally, the debate in the SLA revealed different

121
‘Discussion on Bill No. IV of 1948 – Economic Rehabilitation Bill’, 6 February 1948,
Sindh Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. III, Book No. 3 (Karachi: Government of Sind
Press, 1948), pp. 3–32.
122 123
Ibid. Ibid.
98 Refugees and Minorities in Uttar Pradesh and Sindh

interpretations of the role of rehabilitation officers during this uncertain

transition time For the bill’s critics, these officers were likely to create
problems for migrating Hindus by refusing to accept the validity of
transactions. As far as its supporters were concerned, trusting the officials
involved was essential; as one argued,
I do not think that the Rehabilitation Officer who will be in charge of these affairs will
be a lunatic person. He will be a man of common sense and he will act in a proper
manner as a responsible officer and he is sure not to cancel any sale or exchange
transaction arbitrarily … So we must leave it to the discretion of the officer.124

Evacuee property in Sindh and UP alike came to be viewed in the press

and by members of the local administration as an area of potential
bureaucratic misappropriation. In April 1950, disciplinary proceedings
against government servants in UP exposed instances of bureaucrats
profiting from loopholes in evacuee property, such as one Ram Bojharat
Singh, a supervisory kanungo, who was alleged to be in the possession of
the sir land of Nawab Nasiruddin Khan, an evacuee.125 And there was
habitual suspicion within the Indian central government that some
Muslims had returned under false names so as to try to enter the railway
services.126 But the impact of this situation fell harder on particular
targets: Muslim government servants who remained in UP throughout
had found themselves under closer than normal scrutiny from the outset,
but this was reinforced and further complicated after March 1948 when
significant numbers of Muslims who had originally migrated to Pakistan
came back to India, and for the most part, took up (or attempted to take
up) posts in the lower civil services in states such as UP. In June 1948,
one month before a permit system was introduced to restrict the move-
ment of people between India and Pakistan in July, Indian CID reports
warned of what was described as
a whispering campaign going on here against the movements and activities of
those who have returned from Pakistan. Reports reveal that there has been a gradual
dwindling of correspondence emanating from Pakistan and one of the reasons for
this decrease is that a courier system may have been adopted … Moreover a large
number of people who are still in service in the Indian Dominion or engaged in
business or other occupations have sent their families to Pakistan. Cases have
occurred of government servants going on leave and staying away in Pakistan and

124
Ibid.
125
C. P. Gupta, Deputy Commissioner to Commissioner, Lucknow and Faizabad Division,
‘Faizabad, Efficiency. Compulsory Retirement of the Official after Completing the
Service of 25 Years or Attaining the Age of 50 on the Grounds of Efficiency’, 27 April
1950, Revenue B, Box 121, File 1082B/1948 UPSA.
126
Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, ‘Verification of Character and
Antecedents of Candidates under State Employment’, 10 August 1950, Appts
Box 295, File 1947/321 UPSA.
 Property and Its Control between India and Pakistan 99

not returning in due time while others try to seek jobs in Pakistan by clandestine
methods while those guilty of offences such as embezzlement, especially among the
lower ranks, e.g. constables, run away to Pakistan to escape the penalty of the law …
All of these factors have the result that the general public are beginning to doubt the
loyalty of Muslims to the Indian Union.127

Drilling down to the world of individual government servants and their

families, as Vazira Zamindar has done, reveals that this situation was
rarely one of just the relationship between employee and employing
authority.128 Importantly, it was also complicated by the predicament of
families divided by the new political arrangements. Once the controls on
movement were firmly in place on both sides of the border, government
servants who may have had family members located or re-located across it
were placed under special scrutiny in both India and Pakistan. K. P.
Bhargava, for instance, later wrote to all heads of department in UP that
prima facie there is a presumption against those employees who continue to keep
their families in Pakistan in spite of the fact instructions issued over a year ago
that such action would convey the impression that their interests lie in another
country and that their continued loyalty could not be relied on especially in times
of emergency. Government servants who keep their families in Pakistan will
frequently require leave to go and visit them. They may also constitute a
potential source of communication or leakage to undesirable and unfriendly
quarters of information … which is vital to the security of the country.129
‘Suitable departmental action’ was proposed for anyone who refused to
repatriate family members, and ‘family’ could cover any kind of depend-
ant. There were, of course, many government servants and police officers
who were willing to comply but who were, perversely, prevented from
doing so by the very rules put in place to restrict movement. This
personal conundrum was exacerbated by the bureaucratic hurdles
required to make claims as an evacuee, through – in India – the
Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation, rather than directly to the UP
authorities.130 Hence, Kumari Hamida Begum, daughter of constable
Zahir Alam, and Mushahid Husain, son of constable Shahid Husain of
Dehradun, migrated to West Pakistan during the disturbances in the
western part of UP in the early 1950s. As required, the two constables

127
B. N. Jha to Secretary to Government of India, ‘Restriction on the Movement of People
between the Indian Union and Pakistan and Vice Versa’, 26 June 1948, Home Police,
Box 6, File 211/1948 UPSA.
128
Zamindar, The Long Partition.
129
K. P. Bhargava to all H of D, Principal Heads of Officers, ‘List of Persons in Govt Service
Who Have Gone or Who Intend to Go to Pakistan’, 9 March 1950, Police Dept.,
Box 392, File 899/47 UPSA.
130
S. P. Advani to Chief Secr. to Gov., UP, ‘Verification of Claims of Evacuees’,
19 January 1950, Revenue B, Box 181, File 224B/50 UPSA.
100 Refugees and Minorities in Uttar Pradesh and Sindh

were asked to bring their children back. But they failed to do so because
they were unable to get permits for the permanent resettlement of their
children in India. When this transfer was finally arranged through the
auspices of the Relief and Rehabilitation Department, the system of
passports had been enforced and their family members found themselves
unable to obtain the necessary new form of travel documentation.131
That this element of suspicion surrounding government servants came
to affect especially lower cadres of the civil services in UP was also
indicative of how widespread and arbitrary questions of loyalty could
become. For instance, Mohammad Mobin Khan, a UP kanungo, was
slated for disciplinary action partly for his alleged ‘lethargy’ but also
because ‘his son-in-law who formerly lived in Aligarh has gone to
Pakistan. Although he says that he has no touch with him, yet his loyalty
to the Indian Dominion cannot be said to be beyond doubt’.132 Given
this kind of situation, and fearing the negative backlash of a suspected
connection to Pakistan, many Muslim government servants attempted to
slip away quietly, but in the process were accused of secretly plotting to
migrate. This was the dilemma for Syed Masoodul Haq, a criminal
record keeper from Jaunpur who sent in his resignation from Bombay
and whose ‘loyalty’ was consequently in doubt. It was a similar outcome
for Massom Haider, assistant at the Government Central Girl’s School in
the same district: in April 1951, the Collector of Jaunpur wrote, ‘The
migration of his wife and mother six months before clearly shows that he
was planning secretly to migrate to Pakistan. He could have resigned
while working in tahsil [sic] and then migrated from India. Instead he
adopted a secret mode for reasons best known to him’.133 In other
instances, Muslim government servants were branded as culpable in
corrupt actions – in August 1948, for instance, the UP government
followed up on a number of Muslim constables who had ‘decamped’ to
Pakistan after allegedly embezzling money in the vicinity of Meerut and
Lucknow.134 Such activities were perceived to be fairly widespread in UP
at this time, and supported by public discussions on the subject of
Muslim (dis)loyalty in the vernacular press.135

131
C. K. Srivastava, Dept. Super. of Police, UP, to Dept. Secr. to Gov. UP Home Dept.
(Police), ‘List of Persons in Govt Service Who Have Gone or Who Intend to Go to
Pakistan’, 13 October 1952, Police Dept., Box 392, File 899/47 UPSA.
132
‘Efficiency. Compulsory Retirement of the Official after Completing the Service of
25 Years or Attaining the Age of 50 on the Grounds of Efficiency’, Revenue B,
Box 121, File 1082B/1948 UPSA.
133
‘Restriction on the Movement of People between the Indian Union and Pakistan and
Vice Versa’, Revenue B, Box 181, File 224B/50 UPSA.
134
Note of Lal Bahadur, Home Police, Box 6, File 211/1948 UPSA.
135
See for instance, ‘Musulmano par vishwaas na kare’, Aaj, 12 January 1948.
 Conclusion 101

The relationship between divided and increasingly distant –

metaphorically if not physically – places again occurred around the issue
of government servants. In early January 1948, India’s High Commis-
sioner to Pakistan, Sri Prakasa visited Lucknow to explore the possibility
of the absorption of officials in Pakistan who were desirous to serve in the
UP administration. These were mostly Hindus, appointed by the British
in what local reports described as ‘a system of divide and rule’ and who
wanted ‘their services to be transferred, and with them their provident
fund money and other privileges’.136 In April 1949, a central claims
organization was set up both in India and Pakistan to receive claims
for pensions, provident funds, leave salary and security deposits from
provincial and state government officials and employees working for local
bodies who had migrated. The idea was that each central government
after receiving the claims would forward them to the other government
for verification and acceptance.137 But, as it turned out, the transfer of
funds and other privileges was slow and unwieldy. By November 1950,
salary and provident fund claims of Muslims who had migrated to
Pakistan had still not been completely processed, and the authorities
were asked to expedite them. In the meantime, the relevant monies had
been withdrawn and kept in a ‘suspense’ account, along with those of
other government servants.138 On both sides of the new border, then,
Partition and the challenges it posed, created opportunities for some in
government service and made the position of others precarious.

Conclusion
This chapter has highlighted the effects of population transfer on the
working of, and perceptions concerning, early promises of citizenship in
both India and Pakistan, primarily through the lens of developments
taking place in UP and Sindh and in relation to the flux that character-
ized this period. As Joya Chatterji has argued, formal rights of citizenship
were determined by this movement of refugees between India and
Pakistan immediately following Independence: the timing and nature of

136
‘Absorption of Pakistan Officials in UP: Sri Prakasa’s Reported Mission in Lucknow’,
National Herald, 3 January 1948.
137
‘Instructions Regarding Verification of Claims of Those Government Servants Who
Migrated to Pakistan’, Letter from Officer In-Charge, Central Claims Organization,
Ministry of Rehabilitation, Government of India, New Delhi, 23 January 1950,
Irrigation Department, Box 12, File 111/1950 UPSA.
138
R. S. Das to J. Nigam, Secr. to Gov., Revenue Dept., ‘Arrears Claims of Pay of Shri
Abdul Aziz Khan, Partition Amin, Bareilly, now in Karachi (Pakistan)’, 25 November
1950, Revenue (C), Box 20, File 95C/1950 UPSA.
102 Refugees and Minorities in Uttar Pradesh and Sindh

the various controls on movement, the implementation of the permit

system and then its replacement with a system of passports, she con-
tends, occurred as a response mechanism, especially with respect to
the re-migration of Muslims from Pakistan back to India (there was
hardly any movement of this kind in the other direction).139 But, as this
chapter has explored, the discussion of minority and refugee rights, from
a relational perspective, also gradually came to define more nuanced
and substantive notions of citizens’ rights. These were generated, on
the one hand, by a comparable political milieu in different localities, in
which ideas of the ‘refugee’ and ‘minority’ were gradually changed by the
commonplace experiences of dealing with property, family movement,
occupational benefits and other forms of collateral against the backdrop
of Partition. On the other hand, these notions were also fashioned and
refined by a public sphere of discussion in which events in Pakistan were
reported in India and vice versa.
The fluid and fluctuating links between Pakistan and India – as epit-
omized by continuing connections between people moving from one to
the other and sometimes back again, and the movement of information
(or misinformation) in both directions – were general as well as particu-
lar, with specific reporting, for instance, on each country’s refugee policy
or on decisions taken across the border to promulgate anti-corruption
legislation.140 Some of the most important interactions in the public
space created by this media revolved around popular reflections on
national and local governance, as much as on the interaction of formal
institutions. Notions of citizenship, and more particularly what being
a citizen entailed in practice, came to be based on certain exclusions.
The latter – often exemplified by individual members of minority com-
munities deemed to be in the wrong place – were formed by the material
predicament of refugees and/or minorities that defined notions of
belonging in India and Pakistan. And as we have sought to highlight
here, they were shaped as well by the cross-border interaction of
knowledge about new citizens caught up in local politics of belonging
in UP and Sindh.

139
Chatterji, ‘South Asian Histories of Citizenship’.
140
‘Pakistan Ordinance to Fight Corruption’, National Herald, 7 January 1948.
3 Citizens and the City
From People on the Move to the Movement of Goods

In December 1947 T. T. Krishnamachari,1 Madras member of the

Indian Constituent Assembly, raised the following question:
Will the Honourable Minister for Relief and Rehabilitation be pleased to state
whether the Government are aware that ships bringing refugees from Karachi
have been detained under the orders of the Government of Pakistan, and if so for
what reasons?

Krishanmachari went on to ask whether or not the Indian government

knew that refugees boarding these ships were closely searched – on one
occasion reputedly for nearly fourteen hours – before being permitted to
embark. In response, Minister K. C. Neogy explained that no ships had
been detained under any orders of the Pakistan government, though
vessels carrying refugees from Karachi did have to spend about a day at
the wharf for disembarkation and embarkation purposes as well as to
allow for the completion of the necessary paperwork formalities. This
meant that refugees on their way to India were regularly and closely
searched by both the Sindh police and Pakistani Customs, with this
process usually taking around six hours. In one instance, however, ‘when
the Customs had finished their search and the passengers’ luggage had
been stored in the hold, the Sind police objected that the search by the
customs was not sufficient. All the luggage was taken out of the hold and
searched a second time by the police. On this occasion, the search took
about fourteen hours’ (see Figure 3.1).
Neogy then explained that the Indian authorities had already raised the
matter with their Pakistani counterparts, and both had agreed that there
should be no search of refugees’ baggage in either India or Pakistan. This
decision, however, had not been implemented immediately in Karachi
where the local police had ostensibly wished to continue checking
whether unauthorized firearms, merchandise in bulk and goods whose

1
Tiruvellore Thattai Krishnamachari (1899–1974), popularly known as ‘TTK’, was the
Indian Finance Minister from 1956–8.

103
104 From People on the Move to the Movement of Goods

Figure 3.1 Non-Muslim refugees leaving Karachi by sea,

December 1947.
Photo by Margaret Bourke-White/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

export had been banned by Sindh authorities were being taken to India
by the departing refugees. All the same, following repeated representa-
tions to the Pakistan government, the Indian High Commissioner was
now able to report that there had been ‘considerable improvements’ in
the matter of searching with fewer than than 10 per cent of bags being
actually opened and inspected.2
Krishanmachari's question in India’s Constituent Assembly together
with clarification provided by the minister responsible for overseeing
refugee affairs points to the significance attached not just to people but
also to material things crossing (or perhaps not crossing) the line of
division established in August 1947. And in the years that followed, what
might be described as the material fallout from Partition came to figure
prominently in people’s everyday lives, particularly in urban centres that
were hugely affected by the influx and departure of refugees, and where

2
‘Boundary Commission Awards Punjab and Bengal and Disturbances Arising
Therefrom’, 3 November–31 December 1947, DO133/61 UK National Archives
(hereafter UKNA).
 From People on the Move to the Movement of Goods 105

access to immovable evacuee property became a key issue. In localities

such as UP and Sindh – much more so than other former British Indian
provinces affected by Partition-related migration such as the Punjab and
Bengal – the majority of refugees arriving there after August 1947 headed
for towns and cities. In the case of Sindh, while a sizeable number of rural
refugees were transferred from West Punjab by the central Pakistani
authorities in 1948, most people coming from India gravitated towards
the province’s urban centres. Likewise, many of its inhabitants traveling
in the other direction left behind predominantly urban lifestyles.3 It was
much the same story in UP where cities and towns swelled in size thanks
to the arrival of displaced persons from what had become Pakistan,
including a substantial Sindhi component.
Importantly, in UP and Sindh in the late 1940s and 1950s, the scale of
the disruption caused by Partition-related migration generated new
forms of public critique, both from those seeking new homes and among
those not directly displaced. It is these criticisms of the state that mani-
fested around a range of resources and goods which form the central
focus of this chapter. As Chapter 2, an enduring topic of complaint
during the early post-Independence years focussed on the difficulties
involved in securing accommodation, a place to live. Inevitably there
could be variations on this theme. Sometimes the authorities – whether at
the local or at the national level – were not doing enough; sometimes they
were criticized for not leaving sufficient opportunity for people to pursue
their own initiatives.4
Consequently, there was considerable uncertainty and competition
connected with what happened to immovable evacuee property – that
is, houses and other buildings associated with people who had either
migrated, or were expected to migrate, and whose status as a result had
become ambiguous, both in the eyes of the state and as far as local
communities were concerned. To those who lost out in what was often
a fierce contest over scarce resources, the decisions of rehabilitation
officials regarding the allocation of evacuee property could appear arbi-
trary at best, and corrupt at worst. Personal connections at the disposal of
those with the right networks (or social capital) were often credited with
making a noticeable difference to how successfully someone emerged
from this process of competitive readjustment to their new surroundings.

3
Sarah Ansari, Life after Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh, 1947–1962
(Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2005).
4
Refugee expectations of the state are discussed in Ian Talbot, ‘Punjabi Refugees’
Rehabilitation and the Indian State: Discourses, Denials and Dissonances’, Modern
Asian Studies 45, 1 (2011), pp. 109–30.
106 From People on the Move to the Movement of Goods

However, as we argue in this chapter, the process of securing property

was just one part of a much larger discussion about the movement and
control of goods and services – a situation compounded by the upheavals
of Partition and also related to longer term changes taking place during
and since the Second World War years.
Concentrating in particular on urban centres in present-day Sindh and
UP, this chapter discusses two key dynamics involved in the development
of citizenship that connected with this control of ‘public goods’. In its
first section, it explores the theme of food and civil supply, in relation to
both the politics of prices and price controls and debates about food and
civil supply administration. After tracing the comparative regimes of civil
supply in India and Pakistan and their effect on urban politics, it then
highlights the extent to which supply and control of goods – a major issue
during what was perceived on both sides of the border as a time of
austerity – became an important means through which ideas about
citizens’ relationship to the state were articulated and played out. In
particular, we investigate ways in which civil supply problems became a
point of public criticism in the press in both UP and Sindh, and how
scandals or problems involving this public good were frequently dis-
cussed and debated by Indians and Pakistanis in a similar fashion.
This chapter’s second section moves on to consider the popular dis-
courses surrounding government corruption, which emerged from the
mechanisms involved in the supply of goods and their administration. It
sets out the new postcolonial structures and organizations of ‘anti-cor-
ruption’ as these had developed following the end of the Second World
War, and discusses a number of cases of anti-corruption investigation
dating from the post-Partition period in both our regions of India and
Pakistan. This examination of popular views of corruption extends into a
discussion of how particular scandals developed in the press, and their
broader meaning for ideas about citizenship rights, concluding with
consideration of cross-border smuggling as an ‘anti-national’ problem
in the early 1950s.

Politics of Price Controls and Rationing

In early September 1948, the Indian authorities banned the entry into
India of the English-language Karachi newspaper Dawn , on the grounds
of (what was described as) its consistent violation of both the spirit and
the letter of the Inter-Dominion Agreement that the two governments
had reached five months earlier in Calcutta. From an Indian perspective,
under the terms of that agreement, the press had been directed ‘not to
indulge in propaganda against either Dominion’, nor ‘to publish
 Politics of Price Controls and Rationing 107

exaggerated versions of news of the character likely to inflame or cause

fear or alarm [the] population’. Dawn, it was alleged, had been ‘indulging
in scurrilous propaganda against the Dominion of India’ and ‘wholesale
vilification’ of its ‘major communities and ministers’. The time had come
to clamp down and prevent copies of it from crossing the border into
India.5
In reality, as the content of newspapers being published at the time in
UP and Sindh underlined, there was equally huge dissatisfaction with
developments closer to home. There was a direct and material connec-
tion between the outcomes of Partition, the ‘refugee problem’ and a
range of other urban complaints in both localities throughout the late
1940s and early 1950s. Vazira Zamindar has shown in relation to the city
of Karachi during this period just how quickly refugee interest groups
exploited any suspicion that the local authorities might be ignoring
possible abuses, using the law courts to highlight when and how the
system was allegedly manipulated in favour of those with all-important
connections in the right places.6 The same situation existed in Delhi and
the cities of UP. The public services that came under fire from urban
dwellers, who frequently sent complaining letters to the editors of local
newspapers, ranged from the provision of electricity and water to public
transport facilities, the rationing of vital everyday commodities and bur-
eaucratic abuse.7 Whether living in what had become independent Paki-
stan, or across the border in India, citizens across South Asia faced a
similar set of challenges when it came to negotiating life in their changed
surroundings. In these urban contexts, hastily organized movements to
represent the rights of urban dwellers appeared: across towns and cities
of UP monster petitions and complaints emerged regarding the intro-
duction of new municipal rules or taxes. In January 1948, for instance,
the Lucknow Municipal Board received some 13,000 protests in
response to the introduction of new house and water tax assessments
that were intended to raise around Rs. 500,000 for the local authorities.8
Historians of popular movements in a range of different contexts,
including South Asia, have argued that apparently spontaneous protests

5
‘Dawn’s Entry Banned into India’, Indian News Bulletin, 6 September 1948, FO371/
69735 UKNA.
6
Vazira Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees,
Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) see chapter 4,
‘Economies of Displacement’.
7
Sarah Ansari, ‘Everyday Expectations of the State during Pakistan’s Early Years: Letters
to the Editor, Dawn (Karachi), 1950–1953’, Modern Asian Studies 45, 1 (2011),
pp. 159–78.
8
‘Lucknow Municipal Board’, Aaj, 11 January 1948; ‘Objections against Municipal Levy
Tax’, National Herald, 12 January 1948.
108 From People on the Move to the Movement of Goods

often come about as a result of a sudden transition in standards of living,

or local religious observance, or expectations of the local state.9 In par-
ticular, from the outbreak of the Second World War, a range of urban
protests had erupted in undivided India triggered by the issue of com-
modity prices that were artificially raised thanks to the control of supply,
movement and cost of goods introduced by the wartime control regime.10
This reaction was by no means unique to South Asia, but as a result of the
man-made Bengal famine of 1943, the governance of supply here was
critiqued with particular urgency. The combination of factors that led to
the death of around three million people in Bengal has been extensively
explored by scholars of famine who have also explained the specific
consequences of the disaster in that province.11 However, given what
we now know about the human-made effects of the famine, the govern-
ance structures (of which Bengal was a part) had wider resonance in the
operation of a complex array of civic scandals and protests against them.
As we will argue below, these structures of governance around supply
were important not merely or even principally as instruments for the
control of goods. Rather they were social networks which themselves
illustrated the unbounded and ambiguous nature of the local state in an
array of different (but inter-related) towns and cities across the region.
Rationing and other state-imposed controls had such a big effect on
India and Pakistan’s post-1947 urban populations partly because of the
perception of, and partly because of the effect of, rapid changes in policy.
The most important result of this process was its impact on prices,
something that became most evident during the first year following
Independence. Rationing and the movement of goods stimulated heated
public debate in the provincial assemblies, in selection of candidates for
elections at all levels, and in newspapers and public speeches at this time.
So, for instance, in early January 1948, C. B. Gupta, the UP Minister for
Food and Civil Supplies, announced the imminent implementation of
‘decontrol’ from 1 February, arguing that ‘few could resist’ the appeal
being made by Gandhi for decontrol. Rationing, Gupta further

9
See, for example, the descriptions of social conflicts in Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Encounters
and Calamities: The History of a North Indian Qasba in the Nineteenth Century’, in
Subaltern Studies III: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 231–70.
10
See William Gould, Bureaucracy, Community and Influence: Society and the State, 1930s–
1960s (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 121–30.
11
Lance Brennan, ‘Government Famine Relief in Bengal, 1943’, The Journal of Asian
Studies 47, 3 (1988), pp. 541–66; M. Mufakharul Islam, ‘The Great Bengal Famine
and the Question of FAD Yet Again’, Modern Asian Studies 41, 2 (2007), pp. 421–40;
Paul R. Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943–1944
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
 Politics of Price Controls and Rationing 109

explained, would only remain in place for residents of the six largest
towns in UP,12 for those who earned Rs. 100 or less, and for categories of
industrial and railway workers, refugees living in camps and towns then
under rationing, inmates of jails and hospitals and members of the police
force. However, public reports on this policy also pointed out how, as
had been the case in Bengal in 1943, it was the anticipation of a change in
policy that directly led to hoarding. In this circumstance, it was the
expectation of decontrol (rather than control) that produced the holding
back of goods.13 Hoarding, or at least accusations about it, also sharply
increased in April 1948, albeit under somewhat different circumstances.
Now, due to the spike in prices, the UP government announced that it
was considering the re-imposition of controls on cloth. This need was
partly prompted, the authorities argued, by the entry of newcomers –
refugees – into the cloth trade. In order to prevent either hoarding or the
slowing down of deliveries to the market, local merchants were to be
offered incentives to make sure that their cloth reached anxious
customers.14
The fluctuation between ‘control’ and ‘decontrol’ was itself used as a
political rallying cry in the months after Independence, when it turned
into a means of expressing, and rejecting, a colonial legacy. Hence,
following an announcement that decontrol would begin to take effect
from March 1948, UP’s first Finance Minister K. D. Paliwal in a speech
delivered in the small city of Ora – located between Kanpur and Jhansi –
claimed that the controls would be consumed in the ‘sacred flames’ of
forthcoming Holi celebrations. Here were clear opportunities aplenty to
articulate an anti-colonial message, and Paliwal, among others, argued
that controls had been forced upon them as a legacy of the British Raj:
‘The people have to bear with them and bravely face the acute shortage
created as a result of the war’.15 Such posturing linked well to Gandhi’s
own recent public declarations pointing out the damaging effects of state
control, as demonstrated in his January 1948 speech in Delhi when he
suggested that khadi should be seen as the ‘livery of freedom’ and not
subject to controls.16 Yet, the uncertainty of a situation in which policy
could be rapidly changed within a matter of days undoubtedly fuelled
public distrust. When the UP government stayed its decision to

12
These were Lucknow, Kanpur, Allahabad, Banaras, Meerut and Agra.
13
‘Food Rationing in UP to Go: Mr. C. B. Gupta Announces Decision’, National Herald, 8
January 1948.
14
National Herald, 22 April 1948.
15
‘Further Decontrol by Holi’, National Herald, 2 January 1948.
16
‘Control Blesses the Rich and Curses the Poor: Gandhiji Says Monopolies Must Go at
Once’, National Herald, 7 January 1948.
110 From People on the Move to the Movement of Goods

decontrol thirty-eight towns in the surplus areas at the start of January

1948,17 this then led to huge protests in major cities elsewhere in India as
well as in UP itself. In Bombay and Patna the same month, Trade Union
Congress-led ‘anti-decontrol day protests’ were organized, driven by
claims that decontrol was not in the interests of workers and the middle
classes because it led to the sudden rise in important commodities like
sugar.18 In Lucknow, representatives of the Textile Workers’ Union, the
MES Workers’ Union, the UP Electric Supply Workers’ Union, and the
Electric and Sanitary Workers’ Union condemned decontrol, on the
grounds that it would worsen the living conditions of the ‘common
man’, make prices soar and aid employers to increase their profits.19
In Pakistan, despite the central government producing two apparently
balanced budgets in 1947–8 and 1948–9, the economy came under
increasing pressure very quickly, with inevitable knock-on effects on
people’s everyday lives. ‘Austerity’ was the catchword of the times (see
Figure 3.2). Shortages of basic food items – rice in East Bengal and wheat
in the West Pakistani provinces – and other essential commodities, such
as cloth, resulted in the re-introduction of wartime price controls and
periodic rationing (see Figure 3.3). Under these circumstances, hoarding
and black market trading increased sharply, posing a stark challenge to
the ability of the state to manage the distribution of goods that were in
such short supply. As contemporary press reports underlined, rationing
was a source of frequent disquiet:
A large section for Karachi ration card holders again have been given a paltry four
chhatanks20 of sugar for the whole month of March. In January he was promised
the restoration of his original 12 chhatanks of sugar the following month, but there
was an acute sugar famine during the first 15 days of February. On the arrival of
sugar ships in Karachi the scarcity was removed. But the ration shops were still
doling out only 4 chhatanks of sugar per person in March. There have been
reports of bad distribution in Karachi as people living in Preedy quarters, Plaza
Quarter and Ramaswami area have not received their ration at all. Although no
sugar ration was distributed to Karachi hotels, restaurants, canteens and coffee
houses in February [the Civil Supplies Department] could not explain how most
of the city restaurants were able to serve their customers with plentiful amounts of
sugar last month.21
Ration cards represented an enduring feature, and headache, of daily life:
As another 1948 report explained,

17
‘Grave Food Position May Force UP Govt to Revise Decontrol Policy’, National Herald,
3 January 1948.
18
‘Anti De-Control Day Protests in Bombay’, National Herald, 6 January 1948.
19 20
National Herald, 9 January 1948. 1 chhatank = c. 50 grams.
21
‘Sugar Ration for March only Four Chhataks [sic]?’, Dawn, 11 March 1948.
 Politics of Price Controls and Rationing 111

Figure 3.2 Cartoon capturing the austerity policies of the Pakistan

authorities in the early 1950s. Placard slogan reads ‘AUSTERITY
PARADE’, while the sash on the marcher taking the salute reads: ‘THE
PAKISTANI CONSUMERS’, Dawn (Karachi), 14 August 1952.

Mr. J. G. Kharas, Director of Civil Supplies Karachi has issued a statement

informing the people of about a week’s notice (till October 11) to hand in any
bogus ration cards or risk prosecution on being checked. House to house checks
would be introduced after the above date. No action will be taken against any
cards handed in during the period before this date.22

All this meant that ‘supply’ together with ‘rationing’ were key refrains
in debates about the limits of social consumption in UP and Sindhi
towns and cities. This in turn affected public discussions of urban class
and the problems of how to negotiating housing and rents. In UP, for

22
‘Drive against Bogus Ration Cards to Begin on October 11’, Dawn, 2 October 1948.
Elderly Pakistanis who had lived through the Second World War and the period
following it continued to refer to grocery shops as ‘ration stores’ well into the twenty-
first century.
112 From People on the Move to the Movement of Goods

Figure 3.3 Rationing notice (Dawn, Karachi), 1949.

instance, in January 1948 the idea was mooted that the construction of
luxury homes, costing Rs. 50,000 or more, would be banned in the state,
under a scheme which the local authorities proposed to enforce so as to
ensure an ‘equitable distribution of building materials to members of the
 Politics of Price Controls and Rationing 113

middle classes’. Quotas of cement fixed locally were to be the mechanism

involved, and so in discussion of the necessary legislative provisions in
the UP Legislative Assembly, speakers debated how ‘these days’ lower-
middle-class houses were identified as costing no more than Rs. 15,000
while those of the upper middle classes cost around Rs. 30,000 or slightly
more. The number of houses to be constructed in each district would
be fixed by government and quotas of building materials allotted to
applicants through the drawing of lots by district magistrates.23 Such
discussions took place against the backdrop of wider conversations on
housing problems that had surfaced in newspapers, especially in relation
to industrial cities such as Kanpur, where urban workers combined to
protest against the idea of unfair privileges built into the rationing
system.24
The debate often revolved around the everyday challenge of dealing
with the local administration when it came to housing and rents. For
instance, two acts – the Municipal Act of 1900 and the Rent Control and
Eviction Act – governed the erection and letting out of new buildings.
The former required plans to be submitted in quadruplicate to the
municipal board for approval, a process that often took months and
needed to be chased up. Then the application would be passed on to
the Public Works Department, which was also notoriously slow in
making its decisions. As the National Herald reported, ‘One is fortunate
if, at long last, through the “good offices” of a friend of one of the clerks,
one is able to get the inner machinery moving and finally have the plan
passed’.25 The next headache was getting permits from the District
Supply Officer for bricks, iron and cement. The municipal board, ‘after
sleeping over the plan for months, will suddenly awaken and send the
house owner an assessment for the house and water tax … and then he
starts to receive bills for taxes on a building that is still under construc-
tion’. Next a citizen would have the Rent Control and Eviction Act
showered upon him or her. This would make it necessary to write to a
Rent Controller about when the building could be occupied, ‘who would
then allot the premises to a needy person who is reliable … but invariably
they would turn up then leave, or sublet, or pass it over to a relative’. To
get the rent assessments, a builder would again have to ‘loosen his purse’,
and there would be more weeks or months before the rent itself started to
materialize.26

23
National Herald, 6 January 1948.
24
‘Hamara Nagar’, Aaj, 5 January 1948; ‘Housing in Kanpur’, National Herald, 13
April 1948.
25 26
National Herald, 6 September 1951. Ibid.
114 From People on the Move to the Movement of Goods

Urban differentiations of this kind were furthermore driven by consid-

erations of local corruption. Frequent protests about the corrupt activ-
ities of lower-level officials testified not just to the extent of malpractice,
but also to the everyday frustrations that it caused on both sides of the
new border. Karachi, the nerve centre for Pakistan’s industry, commerce
and finance, was transformed into ‘a place where money pours from all
directions [providing] temptations for the government servants who
exercise a great deal of power and patronage. The businessman is all
too willing to oblige in consideration of large profits which he can derive
from undeserved concerns’.27 Public frustration was as palpable in urban
Sindh as it had become in UP: as one Pakistani critic of changes in
1951 to the local system of charcoal rationing – an absolutely essential
everyday commodity in early 1950s’ Karachi – complained,
The gist of the whole order is that a consumer instead of registering his card in the
shop of his choice is compelled to go to the shop of his particular area, which
means that those favourite shop-keepers who on account of their own faults, and
or bad dealing, were left out by the public have been rewarded for their bad
dealings by the department. … the mere fact that the shopkeepers would know
that there is no competition and the customer has no other option but to come to
them will lead to corruption [but] the only answer which the authorities can give
to this is that there will be official supervision and that we feel is not excuse
enough.28
Prices and controls were, thus, significant reflections of the common-
place experiences of Independence and civic culture, often articulated via
reflections on and comparisons with the recent colonial past and the
continued interaction with government servants under what many
Indians and Pakistanis were coming to see as a neocolonial system. This
was a repeatedly rehearsed public description of how the ‘ordinary citi-
zen’ was forced to interact with government, with corruption a key
dynamic linking the complaints of the public and the everyday to
higher-level stings, notions of social responsibility, and also hierarchy
and power.29 Housing and social expenditure were singled out as areas of
dispute and debate, where the acquisition of wealth by particular urban
communities was blamed for reinforcing the complex of corruption,
both in terms of practices and perceptions. Corruption in civil supplies
was habitually presented in the press and by politicians as socially

27
‘Role of Public Service in Pakistan’, Times of Karachi, 14 August 1953.
28
Dawn, 14 December 1951.
29
See, for example a discussion of this in ‘Bhrashtachar nivarak vibhag’, Aaj, 30
January 1948.
 Politics of Price Controls and Rationing 115

hierarchical, and hence socially divisive.30 Gandhi in his same January

1948 ‘livery of freedom’ speech delivered in Delhi captured these popu-
lar concerns when he raised the issue of the regular trade in petrol
permits. A person, he alleged, could earn Rs. 10,000 by selling his
permit, yet ‘the ordinary Indian’ saw the cost of everything else go up
as a result.31
The issue of just how much cement could be allocated for large
buildings was made particularly poignant in UP cities given the periodic
discovery of large-scale misappropriation of supply across the state. UP’s
largest industrial centre Kanpur again provides a good example of this
kind of official corruption. A large proportion of the cement allocated to
different public bodies and individuals in the state was claimed during
1947 by the Kanpur Development Board. One of the Board’s officers
(who was subsequently and conveniently transferred to Delhi) suspected
that these allocations had been sold in the black market.32 In early 1948,
police raided the Board’s offices where they found registers of cement
sold to its contractors, with the latter reportedly selling cement that had
been given to them for specific works in connection with the former’s
building schemes on the black market.33 Contractors involved in this
cement scandal were arrested and several thousand tons of cement
retrieved from their godowns (warehouses).34 Moreover, it was significant
for public views of corruption that officers themselves were often found
to be directly complicit. Again in Kanpur and during the same month,
the Town Rationing Officer (TRO) conducted a surprise raid on the
Etawah Bazar area rationing office, which resulted in the detection of the
issue of a large number of cloth coupons on non-existent ration cards.35
However, Kanpur was not the only city where these kinds of activities
came to light: a similar supply scandal around the rationing officers
erupted in Azamgarh in early 1948.36 The District Supply Officer
(DSO) and the Assistant DSOs of Allahabad were suspended after
serious allegations relating to cement and petrol permits,37 while a fur-
ther twenty-five were arrested by Bareilly’s TRO for trying to export food
grains from the town in contravention of UP’s Food Grain Movement
Order.38

30
‘Hamara Nagar’, Aaj, 5 April 1948. 31
National Herald, 7 January 1948.
32
‘Inquiry into Cement Misappropriation: Cawnpore Police Make Surprise Raids and
Seize Records’, National Herald, 6 January 1948.
33
‘Cawnpore Development Board Office Raided: Huge Quantity of Cement Believed Sold
in the Black Market’, National Herald, 5 January 1948.
34 35
National Herald, 9 January 1948. National Herald, 7 January 1948.
36
‘Hazaron Bundle Sut Baramad’, Aaj, 3 January 1948.
37 38
National Herald, 10 April 1948. National Herald, 6 January 1948.
116 From People on the Move to the Movement of Goods

Crucially, corruption in civil supplies produced discourses that

increasingly centred on the relationship between what was happening
in the cities of UP and Sindh and other urban spaces, both nationally and
internationally. This connection between different urban spaces emerged
not least because such activities involved movement of goods and trade,
which also linked into political networks in multiple localities. To take
one – representative – case, twenty-five maunds of rationed food grains
were seized in Lucknow on 7 January 1948 at the city station there. The
wagon had been booked by Mr. Ahmad Khan, a subinspector of police in
Shahjahanpur who was coming to Lucknow on leave in preparation for
retirement.39 On a much bigger scale, the UP government moved to
cancel the licences of about 400 steel fabricators across the province in
December 1947, and directed district magistrates to closely scrutinize
the old lists and recommend afresh the names of those concerns that
could be considered genuine claimants to a steel quota.40
Networks of supply corruption spread to spaces further afield, directly
as well as conceptually. Alongside frequent discussions of local supply
corruption in the press in early 1948 were reports on larger-scale scandals
in other places: UP newspapers, for instance, reported the prosecution of
S. C. Mitter, a former Director of Industries Bengal and Controller of
Supplies, Government of India, alongside six others on charges of
accepting, and conspiracy to accept, illegal gratification relating to the
procurement of war materials from Bengal to UP.41 References were also
made to the ‘cloth famine’ of 1943–4, when textile magnates likely to
benefit from proposed decontrol were publicly criticized: these business
interests, which back in 1943 had ‘thrived as never before at a time when
the people suffered [and] never allowed a Tariff Board to examine their
cost of production’, were ‘today expected to be honest and friends of the
people’.42
Nevertheless, the wealthy were not always the obvious target of criti-
cism in this changing critique of corruption. In other contemporary
reports, we find that often a notion of social chaos, created by the influx
of refugees, was deployed as a reason to explain the growth of corruption
and unfair advantage: as one Indian newspaper report put it, ‘Hawkers
and refugees throng the recognised shops and buy outright whatever
stock is made available for sale. The result of this confusing situation is

39
National Herald, 8 January 1948 (1 maund = c. 37 kilos).
40
‘Government Order Review of Steel Fabricators’ Lists’, National Herald, 6 January 1948.
41
Alleged Acceptance of Bribes: Case against Bengal Official Opens’, National Herald, 8
January 1948.
42
‘Who Gains from Cloth Decontrol?’, National Herald, 10 April 1948, Magazine Section.
 Politics of Price Controls and Rationing 117

that there is widespread corruption, and large profits made in transac-

tion, go neither to the manufacturer nor to the public revenues through
taxation’.43 Corruption and anti-corruption thus became a theme for
civic association in ways that intersected different urban localities, via
the supply of moving goods.
Rather like the hagiographies of 1930s anti-colonial leaders, tales of
heroic anti-corruption crusaders, who struck at the roots of the everyday
forms of graft, became popular. One such figure in UP was a district
magistrate by the name of B. D. Sanwal. The local and divisional railway
authorities were reported to have refused to cooperate with Sanwal in his
energetic drive against corruption. In one incident, three bags of salt
belonging to the Doon Salt Syndicate Dehradun were lying unrecorded
in the railway goods office, but when the district magistrate sent for
relevant goods office records, the stationmaster refused to comply. The
divisional superintendent of railways at Moradabad also refused to take
action on Sanwal’s request to halt the transfer of goods office staff who
were wanted by the authorities in connection with an anti-corruption
investigation.44 Sanwal was also noted for his work in Mussoorie where,
as district magistrate, he was credited with organizing ‘the speedy
rehabilitation’ of former Muslim evacuees returning to the district and
their buildings.45
Over the border in Sindh, similar processes were at work. Corruption
and public reactions to it dominated public imaginations. In 1947
Karachi as well as being Pakistan’s new capital was home to Sindh’s
Legislative Assembly and also, at least initially, the headquarters of the
provincial administration. However, less than a year after Pakistan’s
creation, Karachi was formally separated in terms of administration from
the rest of the province. In its new guise as a Federal Capital Territory,
covering a little over 2,000 square kilometres, control shifted from pro-
vincial into central hands in May 1948. This move divided the Pakistani
state – from the perspective of many living in Karachi – into two tiers. On
the one hand, federal ministries and other bodies based in the city
juggled all-Pakistan responsibilities. On the other, a combination of
provincial and municipal-level officials were tasked with addressing com-
plaints on matters ranging from food supplies and housing shortages to

43 44
National Herald, 22 April 1948. National Herald, 6 January 1948.
45
‘Rehabilitating Muslim Evacuees in Doon’, National Herald, 6 April 1948. While most
UP Muslims who were deemed to have migrated to Pakistan did not return to their
former homes, there were cases of individuals who made their way back to India usually
for a combination of personal and employment reasons. See Zamindar, The Long
Partition, for individual examples of this return migration.
118 From People on the Move to the Movement of Goods

educational provision, bus routes and refuse collection.46 General execu-

tive authority was exercised by the office of the Chief Commissioner,
whose jurisdiction extended to control over prisons, police and local
bodies (such as the Karachi Municipal Corporation or KMC), while
sanitation and the maintenance of roads were among the main tasks of
the Corporation. With so many of Karachi’s new residents expecting
considerably more from the local authorities than the latter could deliver,
it is not surprising that people habitually complained about the service
they were, or were not, receiving. By the summer of 1948, just a year after
independence, Karachi – like other urban centres in Sindh – faced huge
problems in terms of how to absorb its hugely swollen number of inhabit-
ants. Water and sewerage arrangements had quickly proved inadequate
to cope with their needs. There was a marked deterioration in municipal
cleanliness, public health services, roads and transport facilities, and so in
July 1948 the KMC was dissolved on the grounds of poor administration
as well as alleged corruption.47
Complaints about poor service being provided by local state represen-
tatives, however, persisted. Time and again, people living in Karachi and
other urban centres in Sindh aired their concerns, whether in relation to
communal water taps that ran dry, or, alternatively, about insufficient
support from officials when too much water in the form of monsoon rains
caused havoc for refugees living in shanty-style temporary accommoda-
tion. In 1950 flooding caused by severe monsoon rains sparked three
weeks of demonstrations outside the homes and offices of federal minis-
ters and Muslim League leaders, prompting calls for ‘more action’ and
‘less oratory’.48 Similarly, 1953 witnessed considerable anxiety, and
public protest, over Karachi’s inadequate water supply that threatened
acute shortages in the forthcoming dry season. There were also ominous
signs that the city’s sewers, constructed for a much smaller urban popu-
lation, were close to breaking point.49 In 1954 a number of refugees were

46
At the time of independence, Karachi possessed a relatively recently created Municipal
Corporation: with a mayor, a deputy mayor and seventy-three councillors (of whom
sixty-five were elected by ballot; the composition of its board reflected the population of
a city that, before 1947, had been made up of c. 50 per cent Hindus, 40 per cent Muslims
and 10 per cent including Christians, Parsees, Buddhists and Jews. In 1950, in line with
the increase in the city’s population, the number of councillors was expanded to 100, of
whom 96 were to be elected by ballot.
47
The KMC remained suspended until January 1954, with its normal business under the
control of a government-nominated British Municipal Commissioner (R. A. F.
Howroyd).
48
‘Recent Developments in Refugee Rehabilitation in Karachi and West Pakistan’, US
Embassy Despatch, 4 August 1950, 890D.41/8-450 USNA.
49
UKHC Fortnightly Reports, dated 16–29 December 1952, 10–23 February 1953, 17–29
June 1953, DO35/5300 UKNA.
 Politics of Price Controls and Rationing 119

killed and many more injured during heavy rains that caused a wall to
collapse on their shacks in the Pakistan Industrial Fairground, prompting
fresh outbursts of what were by now well-rehearsed criticisms of the city
authorities. On repeated occasions, the city’s Dawn newspaper captured
much of this frustration at the deficiencies of the everyday state. Its
comments published in 1952 in response to an ongoing wider campaign
to upgrade Karachi’s status to a full-fledged province highlight the
infuriation:
A government should be judged on its beneficial activities and not on surplus
budgeting. In present day democracy a national government is expected to give to
the citizens a minimum standard of educational facilities, medical help, health
care, sanitary condition of life, speedy justice and law and order. The present set-
up has miserably failed to do so due to Karachi being deprived of a voice in its
own administration.50
But the presence within one city of competing sources of government
authority – federal and municipal – often led to problems, particularly in
relation to the allocation of scarce resources like land for housing. In one
case, a group of refugees were permitted in 1948 to start building on a
plot of land apparently on the written orders of the then Collector of
Karachi. In 1949 the Ministry of Health and Works allotted four blocks
of land to the Pakistan Employees Cooperative Housing Society
(PECHS), one of which happened to include the – by now – constructed
‘Khudadad Colony’. It took until August 1951, following ‘a long silence’,
before the Administrator called a meeting with the Deputy Secretary of
the Ministry for Health and Works, the Collector and a PECHS repre-
sentative to discuss the problem. Instead of regularizing the colony as its
inhabitants had been expecting, however, the Administrator simply
ordered a further survey to establish if accommodation had actually been
constructed. As one of its residents complained, ‘Our houses are pucca
ones and cost … more than half a crore of rupees, which include[d]
expenses incurred in connection with construction of three big mosques,
levelling of uneven land after tollsome [sic] labour, erection of water
stands and cost of water pipe line etc’. For people like this former
refugee, the first priority of the authorities should have been to ‘relieve
us of our mental agony’.51
Pakistan, unlike India, failed to hold a general election during this
period. While polls were conducted periodically at provincial level, where
their results could produce political shockwaves (as in East Bengal in
1954 when the ruling Muslim League was ousted by an opposition

50
‘Case for Karachi Province II’, Dawn, 26 April 1952. 51
Dawn, 8 December 1951.
120 From People on the Move to the Movement of Goods

United Front victory), this meant that Pakistani voters lacked the same
potential means of redress – a democratically elected national parlia-
ment – as their Indian counterparts. Accordingly, in the absence of
representative institutions through which citizens could – directly or
indirectly – air their grievances, newspapers like Dawn (in English) and
Jang (in Urdu) offered valuable outlets for the public’s irritation. More-
over, Karachi was home to a large proportion of the newspapers pub-
lished in Pakistan, testifying to the city’s status as the federal capital and
its importance as the main centre for political comment and criticism. In
letter after letter written to their editors, inhabitants of Karachi poured
out their exasperation at what they viewed as the prevailing adminis-
trative inefficiency, as illustrated by the following critical correspondence
that appeared on Dawn’s pages in early 1952:
The Economy Committee has recently submitted its second interim report
making recommendations to the Government for the eradication of general
inefficiency in the Central Government Departments. But one cause of this
inefficiency does not appear to have been touched anywhere in its first or
second report. [It] is that the officers, superintendents and more than 80% in
the Government departments are those who were recruited in war-time to the
Central Government services as Third Division Clerks and they have been
promoted in Pakistan to the posts of Assistants In-charge, Superintendents,
Administrative Officers, Assistant Controllers, Directors etc. Due to [their] lack
of higher education. … they are incapable of expressing their views properly in the
English language. They generally waste their valuable time in preparing rough
drafts and notes in pencil. Such drafts are invariably amended, revised or re-
written by the approving authorities. To remove the root of inefficiency, it is
suggested that the Central Secretariat may be advised by the Economy
Committee to ban the promotions of matriculates over graduates to the higher
posts beyond the posts of Assistants irrespective of their length of service. This
will not only increase the efficiency in the Central Government departments but
will also give an impetus for higher education.52

These kinds of publicly expressed grievance provide valuable insights

into what Pakistanis in the late 1940s and early 1950s believed to be the
rights and duties of citizens. For an office-holder of the All-Pakistan
Barbers’ Association, who firmly disassociated himself from a demon-
stration by ‘foot-path’ barbers protesting at the authorities’ rehabilitation
plans, solving difficulties by ‘the most peaceful and legal means [were]
the attributes of the citizens of a free and democratic state like
Pakistan’.53 Similarly, when firewood sellers in the city were ordered at
extremely short notice to vacate their shops and move to the newly
constructed suburb of Lalukhet (later renamed Liaquatabad following

52 53
Dawn, 6 January 1952. Dawn, 15 December 1951.
 Politics of Price Controls and Rationing 121

Liaquat Ali Khan’s assassination in 1951), they claimed that, though it

would take them years to re-establish their businesses afresh, ‘We have to
obey the government and carry out its order and cooperate with it, but
at the same time [we] request the authorities to appreciate our difficul-
ties’.54 In this, the recourse of organizations to local protest against the
everyday state, in the face of governments’ actions in cities, could be
seen in similar ways in both UP and Sindh,55 The relationship between
citizen and the state was, after all, a reciprocal one, as such requests as
these testify.
The frustration experienced by ordinary people during Pakistan’s early
years, like those of their counterparts in India, is revealed in the writings
of Majeed Lahori, a journalist and poet who – following his move to
Karachi after independence – became a well-known columnist ready
and willing to raise more widely held concerns through the medium of
wit and satire. In 1948 he began writing a column entitled ‘Harf o
Hikayat’56 that appeared in the Sunday edition of the Urdu-language
Jang newspaper (for which he wrote on a regular basis until his death
in 1957). As his poem ‘Beggary was forbidden but … !’ illustrates,
Lahori always took the side of the underdog, filling the role of ‘a tribune
of the people which no other Pakistan artist had the courage or talent
to attempt … he accurately expressed the embittered feelings of the
general public [with] targets located amongst those whom the Pakistan
movement [had] carried to power: bureaucrats, politicians, black-
marketeers, allotment-grabbers, the ladies of APWA57 and the Shia
community’:58
Get for me a building, get for me a bungalow,
Get for me a printing house, get for me a factory,
Get for me a petrol pump or cinema,
If not a bus, then at least a bus stand.
Get for me in the name of the nation, Oh giver,
It will be kind of you.59

54
Dawn, 25 December 1951.
55
‘Hamara Nagar – hazaron parishan 5 ghante tak bina pani ke’, Aaj, 11 April 1948.
56
Harf o Hikayat = disputing or complaining conversation.
57
The All-Pakistan Women’s Association (APWA) was set up just after Partition by the
wife of Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, Raana Liaquat Ali.
58
‘Death of Pakistan Political Satirist’, 12 July 1957, 890d.41/7-1259 USNA. As pointed
out in this US report, Lahori’s criticisms of Shias would have been understood by ‘the
average Pakistani’ to be targeted at persons of the highest rank in Pakistan and not the
small bazaar merchants belonging to this sect of Muslims.
59
Jang, 14 April 1957.
122 From People on the Move to the Movement of Goods

Corruption and Anti-corruption

‘Corruption’ and ‘anti-corruption’, just as in the late colonial period,
were inescapable features of the political landscape in both India and
Pakistan after 1947. In virtually identical language, politicians in both
countries now urged government servants to ensure that their conduct
conformed to the new ‘cleaner’ spirit of independence and democracy.
In Pakistan, this was epitomized by Jinnah’s oft-quoted instruction to
gazetted officers in Chittagong during what turned out to be his contro-
versial visit to East Bengal in early 1948. After reminding them that
‘those days are gone when the country was ruled by the bureaucracy’,
he emphasized that ‘You do not belong to the ruling class; you belong to
the servants. Make the people feel that you are their servants and friends,
maintain the highest standard of honour, integrity, justice and fair
play’.60 The following October, while Pakistanis were still coming to
terms with Jinnah’s death, the country’s Finance Minister, Ghulam
Mohammad, reinforced the message that rooting out corruption would
‘strengthen Pakistan’.61 A very similar sentiment was expressed across
the border. UP’s chief minister in the first years after independence,
G. B. Pant used much the same rhetoric when he spoke of the need for
clean administration to accompany the political freedoms of independ-
ence. In a speech to police officers in Kanpur in early 1948, he declared
that ‘the days when we detested the red turbans [colonial policemen] are
over’. In discussing the need to fight bribery and corruption, ‘policeman
should behave towards the people just as they would expect police to
behave with their own kinsmen in different parts of the country’. Today,
he argued, officers were not merely policemen, but citizens of a free
nation.62
For many Pakistanis and Indians, therefore, visible ‘anti-corruption’
mechanisms were integral to the way that the new state sought to
distance itself from what many of them viewed as its ‘corrupt’ colonial
predecessor. There was pressure on those who represented it, whether
politicians, elite civil servants or petty officials, to fulfil their responsi-
bilities to Pakistan’s and India’s citizens – their ‘public’ – in fair and
honest ways. Maladministration in a range of forms was no longer
acceptable, at least according to the rhetoric of politicians, at both

60
‘Address to the Gazetted Officers of Chittagong’, 25 March 1948, www.humsafar.info/
480325_doy.php (accessed December 2018).
61
Dawn, 7 October 1948.
62
‘“Imbibe Missionary Spirit”: Premier Pant’s Plea to Cawnpore Policemen’, National
Herald, 17 January 1948; See also, ‘Police Kartashya’, Aaj, 6 January 1948.
 Corruption and Anti-corruption 123

national and local levels: and bureaucrats, like their politician counter-
parts, were expected to operate honestly when discharging their duties.
But the challenge of negotiating bureaucratic procedures together with
the impact of day-to-day shortages of essential goods meant that ordinary
members of the public who wished – to take just two common instances –
to obtain a license to sell controlled goods or a new ration card often
found themselves engaging in some form of corruption. The result was
that ‘many civil servants found themselves in a position of considerable
power. They could influence the commercial fortunes of private individ-
uals by granting licences, awarding contacts or allotting refugee property.
Owing to the shortage of staff such officials often operated without
effective supervision or control’.63
The authorities in both new countries likewise signalled early on their
public determination to address the problem of corruption within
the federal and provincial administrations. In 1947 both Constituent
Assemblies passed Prevention of Corruption acts, making corrupt activ-
ities into a special crime. In 1948 in Pakistan, the (now) federally
controlled Special Police Establishment (SPE), which had been set up
in 1942 across British India to investigate rampant corruption in govern-
ment departments, was officially renamed as the Pakistan Special Police
Establishment (PSPE), and charged with rooting out ‘illegal gratifica-
tion’ in all its various forms. As Fazlur Rahman, Pakistan’s Federal
Minister for the Interior at the time, explained, ‘The functions of the
Special Police Establishment are to investigate and bring up for trial cases
of bribery and corruption involving transactions with the Central and
Provincial Governments’.64 Previously responsibility for addressing these
crimes had fallen under provincial jurisdiction, but this new agency was
intended to supplement and reinforce the efforts of ordinary provincial
police forces: no one would be considered above the law and ‘even a
Minister in Pakistan had no claim to special protection’.65 Likewise in
India, the SPE continued its work after Independence as an organization
at the centre, but its functions were very thinly spread. While lip service
was paid to the idea of regionally linking offices, with branches located in
Calcutta, Shillong, Ranchi, Puri, Jubbelpore, Delhi, Bombay and
Madras, its sanctioned strength in 1948 remained a mere 139 constables

63
Keith Callard, Pakistan: A Political Study (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957),
p. 298.
64
Fazlur Rahman, 8 March 1948, Constituent Assembly (Legislature), Debates, 1948, Vol. I,
p. 320.
65
UKHC Opdom 14, 12–18 February 1948, IOR L/WS/1/1599 BL.
124 From People on the Move to the Movement of Goods

with 70 posts to be filled over the following years.66 In reality, therefore,

the SPE faced stiff resistance in its investigation activities from govern-
ment departments across India where systematic corrupt practices
remained well-entrenched.67
Another comparable early signal of intent in Pakistan was the Public
and Representatives Offices (Disqualification) Act of 1949 (PRODA),
which provided the means for impeaching ‘persons judicially found guilty
of misconduct in any public office or representative capacity or in any
matter relating thereto’.68 This measure arguably represented the
most widely publicized achievement of Pakistan’s first Constituent
Assembly.69 It empowered the governor general as well as provincial
governors to refer any charges of misconduct in public office to the
courts or to a special judicial tribunal, with the penalty for being found
guilty set as personal disqualification for up to ten years. By also permit-
ting members of the public to submit allegations – providing that five
people supported them and could lodge a deposit of Rs. 5,000 – this
legislation made politicians and government servants, in theory at least,
accountable to ordinary Pakistanis. In practice, PRODA came to be used
as a way of putting political pressure on government ministers, either by
opposition politicians or the central authorities themselves, resulting in –
as one contemporary described it – an ‘epidemic’ of such petitions in the
early 1950s.70
By contrast, India did not introduce the same legislative infrastructure
as that set up by PRODA in Pakistan. The outcome was a similar
political milieu in terms of an anti-corruption competition between
political leaders and their associated administrators, but fewer available
mechanisms with which to prosecute malpractice. Accusations of pros-
ecution against government servants were certainly covered by the Anti-
Corruption Act and also a complex series of government servant rules
and procedures (albeit rules which operated their internal social hier-
archies): the Civil Services (Classification, Control and Appeal) Rules;
the Punishment and Appeal Rules for Subordinate Services; the UP
Disciplinary Proceedings (Administrative Tribunal) Rule; the UP Public

66
‘Question in the Constituent Assembly by Prof. N.G. Ranga’, Ministry of Home Affairs,
SPE, File 12/5/48 NAI.
67
Gould, Bureaucracy, Community and Influence, pp. 113–4.
68
Gazette of Pakistan, 9 July 1949.
69
Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly passed forty-four pieces of legislation between March
1948 and September 1954, aimed at amending or supplementing the 1935 Government
of India Act and the Indian Independence Act of 1947.
70
M. H. Gazdar, April 1952, Constituent Assembly (Legislature) Debates, 1952, Vol. I,
p. 1455.
 Corruption and Anti-corruption 125

Services Commission (Limitation of Functions) Regulations; and the

Government Servants’ Conduct Rules to name but a few.71 As far as
politicians were concerned, mutual accusations were usually played out
with renewed vigour around election times.
These important distinctions between Pakistan and India reflected,
in large part, the difference following Independence between a place
(Pakistan) where the bureaucracy managed to retain and increase power
in the polity as a whole, and another (India) where a successor party
ruled through mostly decentralized bureaucratic structures. Whereas
most political corruption scandals in India were contained by the struc-
tures of the Congress organization and party discipline exercised by the
All-India Congress Committee (AICC), the situation in Pakistan was
rather different. For India, political corruption scandals featured heavily
both in the correspondence that flowed between provincial and central
Congress organizations and, likewise, in the local and national press.72
By contrast, in the early 1950s in Pakistan, we find a number of high-
profile judicial inquiries, with four former provincial chief ministers all
disqualified from political office for varying lengths of time. One of the
first to fall foul of PRODA was M. A. Khuhro who – having
been dismissed as chief minister of Sindh in 1948 on the grounds of
‘maladministration, gross misconduct relating to his duties and responsi-
bilities, and corruption’ – was charged the next year under PRODA
regulations. Following his dismissal, a local newspaper editorial praised
Khuhro’s successor, Pir Ilahi Bakhsh for his ‘honest’ admission that ‘the
contagion of corruption had so enveloped the whole of the province
[Sindh] that its effect is discernible in every nook and corner’, and
consequently his ‘determination to eradicate it with a firm hand’. The
new premier’s promise not to interfere in the provincial government
services, which the editorial viewed as ‘a hindrance to good adminis-
tration’ that prevented ‘Public Servants from giving their best to the
state’, was similarly welcomed.73 Pir Ilahi Bakhsh stressed his Ministry’s
good intentions, claiming that before he and his Cabinet colleagues had
even set foot in their offices within the Sindh Secretariat they had sworn
an oath in the presence of leading refugee cleric Maulana Shabbir Ahmad
Usmani to remain ‘scrupulously honest and devote themselves to the
service of the people’, waging ‘a Holy War against corruption and
[making] an all-out effort to eradicate the evil’.74 Later on, in 1951,
following Khuhro’s official rehabilitation and reinstatement as Sindh’s

71
Gould, Bureaucracy, Community and Influence, pp. 116, 119.
72
See, for instance, ‘Congress mein Bhrastachar’, Aaj, 25 January 1948.
73 74
Dawn, 5 May 1948. Ibid.
126 From People on the Move to the Movement of Goods

premier, he was once again dismissed, on this second occasion with c.60
charges of corruption levied against him.75 Though these were rejected
towards the end of the year, yet another PRODA petition was then filed
against him, this time by a ‘group of private citizens’ supported by
opposition factions within Sindh’s highly factionalized political establish-
ment, and he was disqualified from holding office for a further six
years.76 Finally, in 1958 Khuhro was sentenced to five years for alleged
black market activities, involving the illegal selling of an imported, and
very expensive, Chevrolet car. All the same, this outcome did not dent
his popularity among many Sindhis who took the line that it was unfair
for Khuhro to be singled out for hard treatment when many others
involved in the same activity remained at liberty.77 But as this example
suggests, although the practices (and, indeed, the rhetoric) of corruption
and anti-corruption were not dissimilar on both sides of the border, it is
clear that in Pakistan, unlike India, the executive power of the bureau-
cracy and the patterns of political rivalry provided effective licences for
the regime in power to remove officers and ministers on the basis of that
rhetoric.78
There were also important disparities at the local level, not least
because of the varied developments of anti-corruption mechanisms
in the former provinces of British India. Under the Congress regimes
of the late 1930s, UP and Bihar had set up their own anti-corruption
committees.79 By 1946, this had resulted in the formation of district
anti-corruption committees, which were subsequently reformed and
developed through the late 1940s and into the early 1950s.80 In 1955,
they were further enhanced through the acquisition of a formal consti-
tution of membership including the requirement that they contain
members of the state legislature, a representative of the Bar Association
and five nominated non-officials.81 In Pakistan following Independence,
anti-corruption departments were also established at the provincial level.

75
‘Disruption in the Sind Provincial Government’, 15 December 1951, 790D.00/12-
1551 USNA.
76
US Embassy Despatch 959, 29 January 1953, 790d.00/1-2953 USNA.
77
See ‘Impressions from a Trip to Sind and Multan’, 30 March 1959, 790d.00/3-
3059 USNA.
78
See Ilyas Chattha, ‘Competitions for Resources: Partition’s Evacuee Property and the
Sustenance of Corruption in Pakistan’, Modern Asian Studies 46, 5 (2012),
pp. 1182–211, for a discussion of the part that the redistribution of evacuee property
played in the institutionalization of corruption in Pakistan, with particular reference to
West Punjab.
79
Gould, Bureaucracy, Community and Influence, pp. 105–11.
80
‘Measures to Fight Corruption: Pant’s Discussion with District Committees’, National
Herald, 16 April 1951.
81
‘District Anti-Corruption Committees’, Home Police (A), Box 76, File 402/55 UPSA.
 Corruption and Anti-corruption 127

In East Bengal, this move led to over 6,000 cases being registered in
1948–9 (of which about only one-third eventually produced convic-
tions).82 In Sindh, supported by his force of anti-corruption police
officers, wide powers were given to that province’s Anti-Corruption
Commissioner in an attempt to bring about a much-heralded thorough
‘clean-up’ of the provincial administration. These powers included sus-
pending any officer belonging to any department when charged with
corruption, as well as ordering departmental inquiries as and where
necessary. The Sindh provincial authorities were also supposed to con-
sult with their Commissioner when making appointments and confirm-
ing or promoting officers. By the early 1950s, the federal government had
promulgated further anti-corruption legislation. The 1953 Civil Services
(Prevention of Corruption) Rules now meant that a Pakistani govern-
ment official could be presumed guilty if he had ‘a general and persistent
reputation’ for corrupt practices, and if his lifestyle, or that of his family,
was not in line with his ‘visible means’.83 A corresponding pattern of
developments was repeated in other parts of the country. A 1950 report
on Pakistani Punjab, for instance, claimed that the machinery of day-to-
day administration had become noticeably less efficient: ‘water mains are
not repaired, the post is slow and incompetent, canal bank roads are no
longer properly maintained, and in a number of other ways standards are
still falling’. 1951 saw a further rise in corruption at the lower levels, with
increases complaints about bhai-bandi (nepotism) and ‘oppression’ by
subordinate officers.84
No doubt, the fallout from these provincial, national and cross-border
scandals and punishments had a direct effect on everyday discussions
of corruption on the streets of cities in UP and Sindh. In the case of
UP, food procurement and supply controls connected debates in its
legislative assembly to problems of administrative enforcement and the
operating of black markets. In April 1951, for instance, the Minister for
Food and Agriculture, K. M. Munshi, publicly decried a situation in
which the enforcement of hoarding and black marketing laws for food
grains was ineffective, due to the inability of state governments, based on
a popular mandate, to implement such laws, and because of the corrup-
tion in the administration of such systems on the part of administrative

82
This was in addition to the 5,485 cases processed through normal police procedures. See
Nurul Amin, 23 March 1949, Official Report of East Bengal Legislative Assembly, 1949,
Vol. III.
83
Mohammad Ali, 24 September 1953, Constituent Assembly (Legislature), Debates, 1948,
Vol. II, p. 204.
84
UK Deputy High Commissioner, Lahore Despatch, 6 July 1950, UKNA; UK Deputy
High Commissioner, Lahore Despatch, 9 February 1951, DO35/3186 UKNA.
128 From People on the Move to the Movement of Goods

staff.85 But at a more mundane level, for many ordinary Indians and
Pakistanis living in localities such as UP and Sindh, corruption remained
an inescapable fact of everyday life, made all the more difficult by the
reality that the guardians of law and order – the police – were themselves
often culpable. As one early 1948 Dawn report, under the headline ‘He
came… He saw… He suspended’, explained:
Karachi’s Superintendent of Police went out in plain clothes on Wednesday
morning to seek the truth in the public complaint about the prevalence of
corruption in the police force. Strolling up Harding Bridge86 he saw two police
constables on duty stopping over-loaded camel carts and allowing them to pass
after taking bribes. He walked up to the constables and revealing his identity
suspended them on the spot.87
A similarly persistent theme running in many of UP’s Hindi-language
newspapers at the same time was reportage on city-based protests against
the police in places such as Kanpur and Agra. In particular, this included
numerous letters of complaint and articles relating to corruption among
inspectors on the railways.88 Here, the specific grievances highlighted, on
the one hand, systematic corruption in the movement of goods, and, on
the other, the harassment of ordinary citizens as they attempted to carry
out the everyday but extremely frustrating task of booking a train ticket.89
Corruption – or the need to curb it – entered nearly all aspects of life,
criss-crossing and, in the process, entangling public and domestic
spheres on both sides of the border. Just as the notion of citizenship
embraced certain ideals about the family, so ideas about anti-corruption
implicated the ‘roles’ or responsibilities of women. In April 1951 in
fifteen UP cities, plans were set up for an All-India Women’s Food
Council, as a means of ‘mobilizing the Indian housewife to fight the food
battle’ and countering problems of hoarding. As well as joining in this
fight, the campaign promoted the idea that a good proportion of the
country’s food needs could actually be covered by careful husbanding in
the home and that women should pledge to forego one day’s cereal ration
per week and prepare food from non-rationed food items.90
A similar link between citizen-centred anti-corruption and ‘women’s
duties’ was reflected in the writings of Zeb-un-Nissa Hamidullah. Her

85
‘Extension of Grow More Food Scheme’, National Herald, 7 April 1951.
86
Harding Bridge linked Karachi port and the Haji Camp to the city’s main Secretariat
quarter.
87
Dawn, 5 March 1948.
88
‘O T railway bhrashtaachaar band ho, 5 January Gorakhpur mein Virodh sabha’, Aaj, 6
January 1948.
89
‘Railway ke bhrashtaachaar ka Virodh’, Aaj, 20 January 1948.
90
‘Food Crisis and Women’, National Herald, 16 April 1948.
 Corruption and Anti-corruption 129

columns, entitled ‘Thru a Woman’s Eyes’, which appeared in Dawn from

the beginning of 1948, covered topics that ranged from how to handle the
in-laws to impassioned calls to Pakistani women to cast aside ‘bad habits’
and fulfil their duties, not just as wives and mothers, but – equally
importantly – as citizens of the newly created Pakistan, which needed
their help just as much as that of their fathers, husbands and sons.
Accordingly, as in the following piece dating from July 1948, she repeat-
edly admonished them for their own ‘corrupt’ behaviour, and for turning
a blind eye to the misdemeanours of others, and in the process summed
up much of the rhetoric as well as the reality of the post-Partition years:
There is a great deal of complaint of bribery and corruption in our State today:
not that these evils have come with the establishment of Pakistan (for they were
very conspicuous during the British reign as well) but because we are shocked
and pained when we find our Muslim brothers indulging in such activities.
Although men who accept bribes or are guilty of gross dereliction of duty, are
justly condemned by every right thinking individual, I consider that the wife of
such a man is often the real culprit and deserves the blame for all that her
husband may do. …
There are wives, I wish their number were as few as we would like to believe,
who think their husbands are very clever fellows if they can make some money on
the quiet. In fact they sometimes call their husbands foolish for not taking
sufficient ‘advantage’ of the position they occupy. [They] encourage their
husbands to take bribes, and save their consciences by saying that everyone
does such things. Such wives are insulting their womanhood and the power it
gives them. The women of Pakistan have often voiced their love for their country
and their desire to serve it. Many of them complain that they are not provided
with sufficient opportunities to be of service. … A woman must strive to keep her
husband content and thereby make it easy for him to be honest. In her children
she must instil a perfect uprightness of character and a hatred of corruption.
A woman who accomplishes these tasks to the best of her ability has done the
greatest service to the State.91

Meanwhile, there were other problems of supply corruption that shaped

wider notions of social (in)justice. Smuggling was one such illicit activity,
with local newspaper columns frequently reporting on efforts to tackle it,
such as when, to take one everyday instance, ‘32 bales of [illegally
imported] fine cloth’ were seized in the UP city of Kanpur in April
1948.92 Smuggling, on the one hand, represented a direct challenge to
state authority – in particular its ability to exercise control over the new
borders that divided Indian and Pakistani territory and across which
movement was becoming increasingly regulated – but, on the other, the

91
Dawn, 6 July 1948.
92
National Herald, 4 April 1948; ‘Hamara Nagar’, Aaj, 8 April 1948.
130 From People on the Move to the Movement of Goods

very act of publicizing official efforts to clamp down on this ‘menace’

added useful weight to the state’s authority. The difference in value
between the Indian and Pakistani currencies, thanks to the devaluation
of the Indian rupee in 1949, pushed up the profits to be made by
smuggling across – from Pakistan into India – what remained in practice
a porous border. Moreover, the element of corruption associated with
smuggling meant that it could easily assume an anti-national character,
and often, though not always, culprits were assumed to be working in the
interests of the other country, even when economic factors were more
likely to have been the principal driving force. Hence, the illicit cross-
border transfer of goods represented a source of particular disquiet
during the early post-Independence years, highlighting the instability of
the physical boundaries that separated ‘belonging’ from ‘not belonging’.
In Pakistan, non-Muslim government officials were often blamed for
involvement in smuggling, either accused of turning a blind eye or of
offering active support to smugglers. They consequently attracted a
disproportionate share of the blame, and not just in East Pakistan where
a highest proportion of Hindus had continued to live after August 1947.
In reports on anti-smuggling initiatives in West Pakistan that were issued
frequently throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, individuals
belonging to minority communities were often the main target of criti-
cism, whether implicit or explicit: As one 1948 report put it,
The racket of smuggling precious food grains from Jaisalmer state to Sind
continues unabated. There has been a slight check in these activities for some
time due to increased government vigilance. However they are now renewed due
to the help of Mr. Ramchand Advani, Deputy Collector and Sub-Divisional
Magistrate who has always been notoriously anti-Muslim and has a long list of
unhappy deeds to his credit. Whenever any camels and food grains are
intercepted both camels and food grains are returned to the smugglers under
the influence of Mr. Ramchand.93
Smuggling raised challenges for both governments, with the series of
Inter-Dominion agreements signed by India and Pakistan between late
1948 and early 1950 revealing how important but also how difficult
resolving the complicated economic fallout from Partition was proving
to be, particularly during a time when essential commodities were in
short supply.94 In 1949, we see this reality reflected in the suggestion of
drastic measures as the way to check food smuggling from Sindh, which
included declaring a ten-mile (later in practice five-mile) strip of land

93
‘Foodgrains Smuggling to Jaisalmer Continues’, Dawn, 11 October 1948.
94
‘Relations between the British Commonwealth and the Governments of India and
Pakistan, 18 June 1948–21 June 1950’, DO133/91 UKNA.
 Corruption and Anti-corruption 131

along the Indo–Pakistan border as a prohibited area and the introduction

of a compulsory levy on the total produce of local zamindars, regarded by
urban-based commentators as the main culprits. As a spokesman for the
Sindh authorities responded, ‘until and unless the smuggling of food
grains [was] declared as high treason by the Pakistan Government and
drastic measures were not taken’, this ‘evil’ would not be eradicated:
‘The inforcement [sic] of auxiliary forces on the border to check the
smuggling is no solution. The officials should be very hardworking and
without favour’.95 To compound matters further, according to press
reports, there were as few as 55 head constables stationed along the
700-mile border of West Pakistan with India ‘to fight the food-smuggling
menace’, but even so by July officials were claiming somewhat prema-
turely to have halted the smugglers’ trade completely.96
The following year, against the backdrop of the ongoing Indo-Pakistan
exchange rate dispute,97 a mounting number of reports about smuggling
generated another spike in public alarm. Even though a recently signed
trade agreement between Delhi and Karachi had – in theory at least –
legalized the transfer of a number of formerly smuggled goods – such as
tobacco, cigarettes and betel nut products – contemporaries observed
that the trade imbalance (in favour of India, at least this was how it
looked to Pakistani commentators) along with continuing shortages of
essential products such as wheat and rice would keep commodity traf-
ficking channels open for the foreseeable future.98 In response, the
authorities argued that the decision not to devalue the Pakistani rupee –
blamed by critics for a slump in the price of agricultural goods – was
designed to benefit the consumer, and they reinforced the official line
that ‘apart from causing a national loss to the country, smuggling is a
corrupt practice. The Government propose to meet this threat firmly and
if anybody is found indulging in this nefarious activity however high he
may be, he would be dealt with firmly under the law’.99
In 1952, popular anxiety about smuggling in Pakistan reached a new
peak. Newspapers alleged that large-scale smuggling of food grains was
continuing across the Sindh–India border with massive quantities of

95 96
Dawn, 1 April 1949. Dawn, 28 April 1949; Dawn, 1 July 1949.
97
‘Policy Statement Prepared in the Office of South Asian Affairs’, 9 October 1950,
780.00/10–1750, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, The Near East, South
Asia, and Africa, Vol. V, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950v05/d99
(accessed December 2018).
98
In 1949, the Sindh authorities took steps to encourage the production of betel products
to feed the demand of refugee paan eaters for these vital ingredients. Dawn, 13
October 1949.
99
Dawn, 1 September 1950.
132 From People on the Move to the Movement of Goods

commodities in short supply being stored in secret granaries in cities such as

Sukkur in Upper Sindh before being trafficked out of Pakistan to India. By
now smugglers – commonly alleged in the press to be Hindu traders – were
the country’s ‘Enemy no 1’,100 and smuggling was repeatedly tagged as
anti-national involvement.101 Dawn in January 1952, for instance, reported
on the confiscation by anti-smuggling staff of 4,000 maunds of top-quality
wheat while crossing the Sindh border. The smugglers in this case were
alleged to be ‘Hindu banyas’, though in passing it did also mention that
three Muslims had been arrested.102 As some contemporaries pointed out,
prevention held the key to solving the problem, for ‘a potential wrong-doer’,
or so they believed, would be deterred not by ‘the severity of punishment
but [by] its certainty’. Moreover, commentators highlighted the complex
set of interests involved in this ‘nefarious business’. This included zamindars
with their large estates and hence large surpluses of food grains, who
were said to operate hand-in-hand with wealthy and enterprising traders,
camel cart drivers who actually transported the grain to India, the border
police without whose active cooperation large-scale smuggling was simply
not possible and last but not least the bankers and money-changers who
arranged for payment in Pakistan rupees: ‘Which of [these] categories
involved in the smuggling business is an efficient and honest border police
officer likely to catch first?’. Rather than just focussing on how to punish
offenders if or when they were apprehended, critics of the authorities
instead called for the introduction of a Food Grains Control Act, border
patrols with special police ‘equipped with portable wireless, fully armed
with modern weapons’ and networks of informers located in suspect areas.
Crucially, they called for the creation of the necessary ‘socio-political con-
sciousness (or public opinion) in the mind of the peoples against anti-social
offences in general and smuggling in particular’.103
In April 1952, coinciding with severe shortages of food and other
essential items, the Pakistan Constituent Assembly issued instructions
for ‘all-out war’ to be declared against smugglers, with central and
provincial authorities permitted to frame special laws including preventa-
tive detention in order to fight the menace – deemed a rampant threat to
the security of the state – more effectively.104 The resulting crackdown
bolstered the mandate of Pakistani officials to act as primary protector of
the dividing line that separated their country from its neighbour. The
response, however, was mixed, and not everyone supported the new
policies. Muhammad Sadiq Chaudri, of the ‘Sind Cotton Growers and

100 101
Dawn, 27 January 1952. Dawn, 11 April 1952.
102 103
Dawn, 12 January 1952. Dawn, 4 February 1952.
104
Dawn, 16 April 1952.
 Conclusion 133

Abadgars Association’ in Hyderbad, among others, offered a rather

different explanation for the problem:
We have been for past few years been hearing from the high and low that Pakistan
is surplus in food. This propaganda had lulled us into a sense what ultimately
turned out to be false security. The bubble has burst and hunger stalks the land.
The apologist is, however, even now busy in proclaiming that Pakistan is really
not deficient in food and the present calamity is due to bad harvest and
smuggling. … The Government is to blame because while a show of
procurement was made no real procurement took place. … We are one people,
one government and have one aim. The Government can surely take the public
into its confidence and the public will cooperate wholeheartedly.105

Conclusion
In both India and Pakistan in the first few years following Independence,
a great deal of public debate concerned the control, supply and move-
ment of goods. And the matter of food and civil supply became the
material basis for imagining the responsibilities but also broader devel-
opment of the citizenry in places such as UP and Sindh. This was
important, not least because of the anti-colonial rhetoric of previous
years, which as well as being based in the essential corruption of the
colonial system also emphasized its resource extraction. Independence,
and the rights of citizen therefore, also signalled control over national
resources. As Benjamin Siegel has recently argued, the food control and
rationing apparatus in India (and we might argue the same for Pakistan),
served as ‘a locus for managing and imagining the nation’s food econ-
omy’: the idea of public service tied up with the notion of ‘responsi-
bilities’ for goods control, as well as ‘rights’ to those resources – the dual
underpinning of the material bases of citizenship.106 It was for this reason
too, that food/supply-related corruption became such a powerful political
issue following Partition.
As demonstrated by Krishnamachari’s question in the Indian Con-
stituent Assembly in late 1947 that opened this chapter, from the outset
concerns were articulated not just in relation to people moving but what
they might be taking with them when they travelled between Pakistan and
India. And such concerns did not abate in the years that followed. To
take just later one incident, Pakistan-bound passengers in 1949 protested
vociferously about the searching of their baggage by Indian officials as

105
Dawn, 28 February 1952.
106
Benjamin Robert Siegel, Hungry Nation: Food, Famine and the Making of Modern India
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 88–9.
134 From People on the Move to the Movement of Goods

they journeyed by train across the Rajasthan border into Sindh, with
similar complaints surfacing as a repeated refrain throughout this
period.107 As reactions to the issue of smuggling discussed above sug-
gest, and as this chapter has underlined more broadly, fierce competition
for scarce material resources such as foodstuffs, cloth and concrete
marked the early postcolonial period in both India and Pakistan.
In our chosen localities of UP and Sindh, material shortages – within
the wider framework of the economic austerity of the late 1940s and early
1950s – directly stimulated public discussion in the form of state rhetoric
as well as stoking citizen complaint. Likewise, corruption, and how to
limit if not to eradicate it totally, regularly dominated local headlines as
the two sets of authorities tried to put a stop to this activity, deemed by
many contemporaries to be against the national interest and hence ‘unpat-
riotic’. In a similar fashion, anti-corruption campaigns, like anti-smuggling
efforts – whether in Pakistan or in India – became methods of determining
who belonged and who did not: in effect, as we have explored in this
chapter, a citizen was increasingly deemed to be someone who placed the
public good ahead of their personal ambition or needs.

107
Dawn, 10 September 1949.
4 New Constitutions, New Citizens

In the September 1947 issue of The Modern Review,1 published in

Calcutta very soon after Independence and Partition, a short article
entitled ‘Nationality in the Indian Union’ posed the question – from a
legal perspective – as to ‘what principle should decide the [sic] nationality
in the Indian Union’. As its author Amarendra Nath Mukerjee pointed
out, the Fundamental Rights Sub-Committee of the Indian Constituent
Assembly was already framing the new country’s draft nationality clause,
and so for him this was precisely the right time to direct attention to a
matter that ‘seems to be the most essential factor in the political life of a
person’.2
Interestingly, however, Mukerjee’s article did not linger long on the
legal tussle between the determining principles of jus soli and jus sanguinis
but moved quickly to a question that obviously preoccupied him, that of
the possibility of South Asian citizens holding a ‘double nationality’. As
he put it, ‘If the Hindus of Sind [sic], the Sikhs of a part of the Punjab and
the Hindus of East Pakistan are deprived of their Indian nationality
because they happen to belong to those parts of the country which under
most unfortunate circumstances form a different state (Pakistan), it
would be doing a great injustice to them and alienating them for ever
from their motherland’. Under the current ‘peculiar circumstances’ in
which they were submitting to Pakistani nationality ‘with reluctance and
under pressure of circumstances’, the desirable way forward would be to
confer ‘the benefit of Indian nationality’ upon Pakistani Hindus, making

1
The Modern Review, founded in 1907, carried essays on politics, economics, sociology,
as well as poems, stories, travelogues and sketches, becoming ‘the leading journal
of the progressive Indian intelligentsia’, Ramachandra Guha, ‘A Mask That Was
Pierced?, The Hindu, 24 April 2005, www.thehindu.com/mag/2005/04/24/stories/
2005042400270300.htm (accessed December 2018).
2
Amarendra Nath Mukerjee, ‘Nationality in the Indian Union’, The Modern Review 82, 3
(September 1947), pp. 203–4.

135
136 New Constitutions, New Citizens

them concurrently subjects of Pakistan and India. But, significantly, for

Mukerjee, there was no harm in granting this concession for, as he
reminded readers of The Modern Review, ‘We must not forget that the
consent of the people is an essential factor in determining their national-
ity at the present time’: individual self-determination, or personal choice,
lay at the centre of his argument. And so, while he conceded that creating
provisions for the acquisition of Union nationality by Hindus in Pakistan
might ‘give rise to jarring claims’, Indian law ‘should not follow the
beaten track’.3
It is now widely recognized by historians and political scientists that
processes of exclusion as much as inclusion drive and shape the concept
of belonging. Developments in the subcontinent from 1947 prove no
exception to this rule. Determining nationality – and as a consequence
who did or did not legally belong where – represented a central and
consistent priority throughout the constitution-framing years that
followed Independence and Partition in both India and Pakistan.4
Anupama Roy in Mapping Citizenship has explored from a legal per-
spective various moments in the history of India’s citizenship laws and
the twists and turns within them since 1947, showcasing the ‘liminality’
of the concept of citizenship, and how far the legal citizenship in India
that emerged at the commencement of the Indian Republic in the
context of Partition’s fallout remained a contentious and contested
issue.5 According to Vazira Zamindar, bureaucratic and juridical acqui-
sition of the term ‘migration’ proved particularly problematic in
attempts to control and fix Partition-related displacement within the
bounded limits of these two newly emerged hostile countries.6 More
recently, Joya Chatterji has highlighted the extent to which India and
Pakistan followed similar trajectories in terms of citizenship formation
while also pointing to where these diverged, challenging what she views
as Zamindar’s overemphasis on the role of the state and substituting
this approach with greater acknowledgement of the impact of pressure
from below.7

3
Ibid.
4
Sarah Ansari, ‘Subjects or Citizens? India, Pakistan and the 1948 British Nationality Act’,
The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41, 2 (2013), pp. 285–312.
5
A. Roy, Mapping Citizenship in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010).
6
Vazira Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees,
Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
7
Joya Chatterji, ‘South Asian Histories of Citizenship, 1946–1952’, Historical Journal 55, 4
(2012), pp. 1049–71.
 New Constitutions, New Citizens 137

Acknowledging the direction of travel of recent historiographical

discussion, this chapter takes as its starting point Chatterji’s observa-
tion that ‘the citizenship regimes of India and Pakistan shared remark-
ably significant … symmetries’,8 and considers how far the processes
involved in constitution-building and citizenship-making in both
countries as well as their early experiments with democratic elections
based on a universal franchise shed light on evolving notions of citi-
zenship in postcolonial South Asia. Further, we explore the ways in
which the concept of ‘citizen rights’ that were encapsulated within
their post-Independence constitutions (1950 in the case of India and
1956 for Pakistan) chimed with the events and processes explored in
Chapters 1–3 and what many ordinary Indians and Pakistanis at the
time believed were their rights as ‘citizens’ to be. When deciding upon
citizenship rights, both governments faced the common challenge of
having to negotiate the dissonance between the agenda that they set
from above and the way in which this agenda was interpreted and
implemented from below. Rather than assuming that the two countries
in constitutional terms moved – inexorably – in separate directions, we
draw attention to similarities as well as differences between the pro-
cesses at work in the decade following Independence, and thus to the
degree of interconnectedness that operated despite the upheavals of
1947. In this context, a range of quotidian readings of constitutional
rights emerged alongside more formal expressions of citizenship
entitlement.
In contrast to earlier approaches that have viewed constitutions as
‘canonical’ documents located at the heart of processes of attempted
consensus,9 this chapter highlights the decentring processes of
constitution-making as contingent practices, which can implicate ordin-
ary subject/citizens, their experiences of governance and their multiple
imaginaries of rights. One lens through which it looks at these develop-
ments is the range of responses to the new constitutions and other
constitutional documents that were implemented in the decade following

8
Ibid., p. 1051.
9
For instance, the main work on India’s constitution by Granville Austin, naturally places
the formal drawing up of the document at the centre of its narrative. Since Austin’s
extensive and seminal work, there has been very little focus on the broader social
implications of what he described as ‘first and foremost a social document’. See
Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1999).
138 New Constitutions, New Citizens

Independence, reactions that were often linked to notions about the

allocation of and access to public goods. Another way that it investigates
them is via India and Pakistan’s early experiments with democratic
elections, and other similar if not identical state-building efforts that
drew on and invoked notions of citizenship and belonging. For, as we
argue in what follows, the postcolonial state – whether Indian or Paki-
stani – did not simply engage with its citizens through formal political
processes during this period of transition. Instead, official initiatives,
such as national censuses, offered opportunities for its citizens alike to
engage with the new – postcolonial – political reality taking shape across
South Asia in these important transition years.

‘New Constitutions’
Here comes the biggest republic of the world,
Prepare the throne for the 300 million people,10
The coronation is not of a king today.
It is of the people.11

India and Pakistan today are associated with markedly different reputa-
tions when it comes to their long-term democratic credentials. Despite
the challenge to the post-1947 Nehruvian dream of a secular India posed
by the recent success of Hindu nationalist parties and politicians, India’s
western-style parliamentary democracy – drawing on political ‘credit’
built up over the decades following Independence – continues to be
celebrated by many onlookers as the largest democratic state, as well as
the most successful by rates of participation, in the contemporary world.
Pakistan, by contrast, earned itself a poor reputation for democracy
thanks to the imposition of military rule that displaced civilian politicians
at periodic intervals after 1947, earning it the label of a ‘failing’ if not
‘failed’ state (despite more recent elections resulting in relatively smooth
handovers of power from one political party to another).
Constitutionally, too, India and Pakistan tend to be viewed as being
poles apart. Both drew heavily on the same 1935 Government of India Act
when it came to their constitutional agendas, but whereas India’s
1950 Constitution remains in place after more than 70 years (albeit with
hugely significant subsequent amendments), Pakistan’s 1956 Constitution
was abrogated within two years when the military seized power in 1958,

10
A reference to the estimated population of the Indian Union in 1950.
11
Extract from the poem entitled ‘Vacate the Throne, for the People are Coming’ (Singhasan
khaali karo ke janata aaati hai) by Dr. Ramdhari Singh ‘Dinkar’ (1908–74), who wrote it
on 26 January 1950, the day on which the new Indian Constitution became effective.
 ‘New Constitutions’ 139

Figure 4.1 Indian leaders in the Constituent Assembly, Council House

Library, New Delhi, 1947.
Photo by Hulton Deutsch/Corbis Historical/Getty Images

and thereafter a succession of civilian- and military-led administrations

sought to re-mould Pakistan in different constitutional ways. This first
section consequently explores the processes involved in constitution-
building in India and Pakistan in the late 1940s and 1950s and how people
living in them at the time viewed their own rights and responsibilities.
India and Pakistan began life as independent countries in August
1947 with a common legacy in the shape of two separate indirectly
elected Constituent Assemblies (see Figure 4.1).12 Originally established

12
The idea for a Constituent Assembly of India was proposed in 1934 by M. N. Roy,
pioneer of the Communist movement in India and an advocate of radical democracy. It
became an official demand of the Indian National Congress in 1935. In
1939 Rajagopalachari had voiced the demand for a Constituent Assembly based on
adult franchise, something that was eventually accepted by the British in 1940 when
the Viceroy Linlithgow’s August Offer included allowing Indians to draft their own
constitution. Under the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946, elections were held for the first
time for the Constituent Assembly, with members elected by the provincial assemblies by
a single transferable vote system of proportional representation in August that year. The
total membership of the Constituent Assembly was 389: 292 were chosen by the
provinces, 93 represented the Princely States and 4 were from the chief Commissioner
Provinces of Delhi, Ajmer-Merwara, Coorg and British Baluchistan.
140 New Constitutions, New Citizens

as one combined body in 1946, the institution split following the

announcement of the Partition Plan on 3 June 1947, when representa-
tives from Sindh, East Bengal, Baluchistan, West Punjab and the North
West Frontier Province – territories more or less certain by then to be
part of Pakistan – withdrew to form Pakistan’s own separate assembly
that met for the first time in Karachi on 10 August. In India, what
remained of the original body reassembled on 14 August and assumed
parliamentary authority, holding its first working session at the end of
December. By January 1950, the Indian Constitution had been promul-
gated; it took until 1956 for its Pakistani equivalent to materialize. Both
were contentious exercises in translating democratic hopes and expect-
ations into political reality.
Until recently, a number of inter-related research paradigms have
stalled the development of more socially nuanced accounts of South
Asia’s post-1947 constitutional processes.13 As far as India is concerned,
older ‘constitutional histories’, for instance, formed part of the empirical
and structural studies of the colonial system that emerged during the
1960s and 1970s. Historians writing during this period tended to explore
Indian politics as a Namierian-style response to shifting colonial jurisdic-
tions, in which constitutional systems of dyarchy and provincial auton-
omy formed a proverbial steel frame.14 From the 1980s, these were
subsequently critiqued and effectively limited as an area for ongoing
research by scholars from within the tradition of Subaltern Studies.
Problems also emanated from another direction – namely the assumption
that the enactment of its 1950 Constitution represented an end point in
the fulfilment of India’s freedom struggle.15 As the ‘logical [legal] con-
clusion’ to decades of British imperialism, this foundational political text
has thereby been made rather static in political and historical accounts. It
has been represented as a document of rights, classifications and feder-
ated structures, embedded beneath India’s fluid political realities, with
its history one of constitution makers and the formal ends to which they
were driven – in other words, the realm of politics from above. But,
surprisingly, with the exception of the recent work of Rohit De, the
1950 Constitution that underpins India’s brand of democracy does not

13
The most prominent exception to this is Rohit De, A People’s Constitution: The Everyday
Life of Law in the Indian Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).
14
Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Peter Robb and
David Taylor (eds.), Rule, Protest, Identity: Aspects of Modern South Asia (London:
Curzon Press, 1978).
15
Arvind Elangovan, ‘The Making of the Indian Constitution: A Case for a Non-
Nationalist Approach’, History Compass 12, 1 (January 2014), pp. 1–10.
 ‘New Constitutions’ 141

possess a serious or detailed historiography that explores its broader

popular significance.16 Studies such as the one by Granville Austin,
dating from 1966 and extended in 2004, still dominate the literature,
placing the 1950 Constitution firmly at the heart of independent India’s
legal history, and framing it as the canonical document embodying
India’s moment of national freedom and democratic institution-build-
ing.17 As such, India’s Constitution continues to be presented largely as a
document that was the product of (changing) consensus, with little
detailed sense of how its meanings were shaped or evoked by those
outside the formal political processes of the state.
Studies of Pakistan’s fluid constitutional arrangements have been
similarly constrained. Owing to the fact that political agreement could
not be reached until 1956, in large part because of the difficulties
involved in reaching an agreement between the different ‘constituencies’
within the country, the process of constitution-making in Pakistan turned
out to be particularly drawn out, dominating discussions at the federal
level for nearly a decade following Independence. Unlike India where
later constitutional amendments offered a way of making changes, suc-
cessive Pakistani regimes chose (at least until the 18th Amendment of
2010) to rewrite the country’s constitution afresh, whether we are talking
about General Muhammad Ayub Khan’s 1962 replacement constitution
that provided for a presidential form of government – abolishing the
office of prime minister and establishing a tier of electoral colleges
starting with 80,000 Basic Democrats divided equally between the two
wings of the country – or Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s 1973 revision that turned
Pakistan into a parliamentary democracy but with executive power
concentrated in the office of the prime minister. Hence, scholars with
an interest in Pakistani political history have focussed mainly on what
these successive constitutions reveal about the regimes that introduced
them, and how they fitted into the broader power struggles of their time –
again, a politics from above approach.18
Exploring processes of constitution-making in India and Pakistan in
the late 1940s and 1950s alongside each other highlights common chal-
lenges in their parallel, if not identical, transitions from colonial rule to
Independence. This approach also points to the important interactions
taking place between developments at the political centre and popular

16
Uday Mehta, ‘Constititutionalism’, in Oxford Companion to Indian Politics, eds. Niraja
Jayal and Pratap Bhanu Mehta (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 15–27.
17
Austin, The Indian Constitution; Granville Austin, Working a Democratic Constitution: The
Indian Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
18
Imran Ahmad, ‘“Strategic Constitutions”: Constitutional Change and Politics in
Pakistan’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 40, 3 (2017), pp. 481–99.
142 New Constitutions, New Citizens

responses in both countries despite their different circumstances. That

the two sets of processes were closely interlinked is clear, at least to the
extent that what one enacted had consequences for the other, whether
directly or indirectly or thanks to what was or was not incorporated in
their respective new constitutional arrangements.
Let us turn first to the Indian side of the border, where the new
Constitution was formally promulgated at the end of January 1950. For
international observers it was clear that this constitutional document –
containing 395 sections and incorporating 8 schedules – ‘broke all previ-
ous records’.19 Five sessions of the Constituent Assembly had been
devoted to it, and in all 2,473 amendments had been moved, not to
mention frequent debates behind the scenes. The Constitution, having
been agreed, now had to be put into practice. And here what is particu-
larly striking is the contrast between reporting on it prior to India’s first
general election in 1952 and reflections afterwards. Before 1952, the
views of Patrick Gordon Walker, then British Secretary of State for
Commonwealth Relations, epitomized the earlier response:
The inauguration on the 26th January was, indeed, something of an anti-climax
to the man in the street: for to him, in essence, the position remained what it had
been since the transfer of power … Some of the ideals seem impossible of
fulfilment in any foreseeable future and almost ludicrously inapposite in the
context of Indian poverty and backwardness.20

Walker, with a possible tinge of resentment, continued: ‘it is one thing to

write a constitution, another to make it work’. What was also noticeable
for him in 1950 was the absence of specific protections for ‘minorities’ –
for which he read Muslims – but equally he commented that it was
‘satisfactory that so great a preponderance of authority has been granted
to the centre’. There seemed to be a grudging recognition on his part that
democracy ‘may work’ but equally that India had ‘deeply rooted in its
political practice the tradition of despotism’, although, for British obser-
vers such as Walker, resistance to despotism remained an ‘Anglo Saxon
concept’.21
In many respects, the well-known projects of social justice contained
within India’s 1950 Constitution seemed somewhat hollow to contem-
porary observers, and were often reported as such at the time. During
parallel celebrations in Kathmandu, the Indian Ambassador to Nepal,
C. P. N. Singh, referred in his speech to a ‘long war of Independence’ led

19
P. C. Gordon Walker, Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, March 1950,
FO371/84239 UK National Archives (hereafter UKNA).
20 21
Ibid. Ibid.
 ‘New Constitutions’ 143

by the Congress as the greatest element in that achievement. For him, the
Indian Republic stood for the ‘fundamental human rights of man’, while
the idea of the ‘secular state’ would bind India in ‘a homogenous unity to
overcome religious, linguistic and provincial differences that enslaved us
to foreign rulers’. As a result, in his view, their new constitution
empowered Indians to oppose colonialism in all its forms around the
world, as well as to denounce war as an instrument of policy and to bring
about ‘the renaissance of the ancient traditions and culture of Asia’.22 On
the other side of the world, in Washington, DC, the US Congress
celebrated the nobility of the project, with the Congressional record
suggesting that ‘as partners in democratic faith, India and America can
help meet the moral and material needs of mankind. The peoples of
India and the peoples of America share a spiritual strength … Together,
India and America can make the four freedoms real for all races and
nations’.23 In the meantime, British government representatives lost few
opportunities to express their doubts. At Republic Day celebrations
organized by Indian embassy officials in Stockholm the same year,
British reporters suggested that the National History Museum had been
ransacked for specimens of Indian fauna – three peacocks, a cheetah and
a gazelle. ‘The Indian Minister, and still more Mrs Nehru, have lost no
opportunity of impressing on anyone who cares to listen the merits of the
ancient Indian democracy’, reported the UK Ambassador, adding per-
haps disappointedly, ‘I cannot say that they have permitted themselves
any generous tributes to British statesmanship in bringing the new
Republic to birth’.24
The notion that the rights and freedoms guaranteed by its new consti-
tutional framework were somehow too advanced for a country like India
was not only held by western observers. Individual figures within the
Congress organization itself, especially those occupying government
roles, could be just as cynical concerning what they regarded as the
precipitate creation of new freedoms, and hence some of them advocated
renewed control over the Fundamental Rights that it included. This was
evident at a regional level as well. In UP, its Chief Minister G. B. Pant
certainly held this view as far as press freedoms were concerned. When it
came to the tendency of UP newspapers to criticize public servants
openly and to expose corruption scandals, Pant complained that ‘Free-
dom of speech and expression guaranteed by the constitution is being

22
Speech of C. P. N. Singh, FO371/84239 UKNA.
23
Congressional Record, Senate, 26 January 1950, FO371/84239 UKNA.
24
A. Lambert, ‘Republic Day Celebrations in Stockholm: Publicity and Comment in the
Press’, 30 January 1950, FO371/84239 UKNA.
144 New Constitutions, New Citizens

wantonly abused. Venomous and filthy attacks are being made from day
to day against the central and state governments and ministers and
officers holding responsible positions maliciously and in an extremely
vulgar and indecent manner’.25 In a 1951 note, entitled ‘On some
proposed amendments to the constitution of India’, Pant suggested to
Nehru that it might eventually be necessary for reasons of ‘decency and
morality’ to amend Article 19 of the Constitution on freedom of speech
by adding conditions regarding libel, defamation, slander and the con-
tempt of court. After all, Clause II of Article 19(a) had already imposed
restrictions on the exercising of this freedom. Unlike many other coun-
tries, Pant continued, where courts were permitted to intervene to decide
the scope of police powers, this was not the case in India, where ‘courts
[were] powerless to question the propriety or reasonableness of a law
restricting the freedom of speech or expression’. As Pant explained,
In other countries there are certain standards of public life which are usually
adhered to and sound principles defining and limiting freedom of speech
and expression have gradually evolved. Our constitution being only a year old,
healthy traditions which normally develop in the course of time, have not yet
developed.26
The amendment of Article 19 eventually became the subject of legislative
enactment in the autumn of 1951, when the Indian government intro-
duced the Press (Incitement to Violence) Bill, which provided scope for
the authorities to take action against the publication, circulation or exhib-
ition of ‘objectionable matter’.27 Journalists’ organizations were furious
and the press in UP criticized the bill for re-affirming some of the pre-
Independence censorship powers of the Indian Press Emergency Powers
Act.28 The UP Working Journalists Union passed a resolution against the
legislation, claiming that it continued the powers of the 1931 Act, and
that the idea of ‘objectionable matter’ was too vague.29

25
G. B. Pant to Nehru, 5 March 1951, Pant Papers, Reel 1 Nehru Memorial Museum
Library (hereafter NMML).
26
‘Note on Some Proposed Amendments to the Constitution’, 5 March 1951, Pant
Papers, Reel 1 NMML.
27
‘Press Bill Is Introduced’, National Herald, 1 September 1951.
28
‘The Press Bill’, National Herald, 8 September 1951. During the Second World War, the
executive had exercised exhaustive powers under the Defence of India Act. Pre-
censorship was reinforced, in the shape of the 1931 Press Emergency Powers Act and
the 1923 Official Secrets Act. At the same time, the publication of all news relating to the
Congress activities was declared illegal. The special powers assumed by the Government
during the war ended in 1945.
29
‘No Justification for Press Bill: UP Union Executive Urges Appointment of
Commission’, National Herald, 10 September 1951.
 ‘New Constitutions’ 145

In relation to other issues, however, the UP government was able to

claim that it was very closely following the Fundamental Rights as laid
down in the Constitution. Pant argued firmly against any amendment to
Article 31(4), which underpinned the redistribution of large landed estates
via Zamindari Abolition, and was keen to show how this chimed in with
notions of equality while still allowing for notions of discrimination:
Ours is a Republican constitution. The preamble of our Constitution declares to
secure to all the citizens of the state equality of status and of opportunity …
Equality of persons is the fundamental on which our Constitution has been
built … it is another thing that sometimes discrimination is necessary in the
interest of the collective interest of the community and in such cases it will not
be correct to say that equality before the law or the equal protection of law has
been denied … Every individual has rights not absolute but in the context of
collective rights of the community.30
But alongside circulating concerns about equality and justice, prior to
January 1950, there was also more basic disquiet that was discussed at
length a propos how the Constitution’s subtle notions of secular rights
would play out in reality. A resolution regulating communal organiza-
tions, for instance, had been passed by the Constituent Assembly on
3 April 1948, influenced by continuing communal tensions as well as
Gandhi’s still very recent assassination. Nevertheless, both at that time
and later on, Nehru’s administration acknowledged the difficulties of
drawing ‘a clear cut line between religious, cultural and social and
educational activities (which may be termed non-political activities)
and other political activities’.31 The main challenge was that the Funda-
mental Rights soon to be conferred by the Constitution could render
certain types of political activities justifiable even when they were pursued
by communal organizations. To take just one example, if some of these
Fundamental Rights were in practice denied to a particular community in
a particular area, then its members might justifiably organize themselves
for the purpose of asserting these entitlements and getting other commu-
nities to recognize them. This concern was in addition to the implicit
‘communal’ assumptions underlying the principle of provisions for
‘depressed classes’ that the Constitution contained.
Doubts about the application of the Constitution, especially in relation
to secularism, were exposed by responses to the election of P. D. Tan-
don – leading member of the right wing of the Congress who hailed from
UP – as the party’s president in 1950, in the process defeating the Sindhi

30
Re: Zamindari and Article 31 HCM, note 2, 5/3/51, Pant Papers, Reel 1 NMML.
31
‘Regulation of Communal Organizations’, Min. of Home Affairs Ests F 60/220/48 NAI.
146 New Constitutions, New Citizens

politician Acharya Kripalani32 who was widely believed to be backed by

Nehru. As we saw in Chapter 2, Tandon had been publicly urging the
Indian authorities to adopt a tougher line on evacuee property, refugees
and Pakistan more generally, resulting in fellow Congress members such
as Rajagopalachari, by now the governor general, to express concern
about the growth of a militant Hindu spirit within the party and how this
might confront a militant aspect of Pakistani identity.33 Karachi news-
papers reacted to Tandon’s election by suggesting that his victory was a
clear indication of the growing strength of communalism within the
Congress. According to Dawn’s leading article on 5 September that year,
his appointment represented the first crack in the walls of Nehru’s
cabinet, and ‘the biggest potential danger to the more sensible section
of the Congress’.34
Despite such misgivings, it was still the case that the Fundamental
Rights contained within the Indian Constitution were arguably more
developed and held more promise than any modern constitution had
previously offered. Furthermore, the creation of a republic that was to
stay within the Commonwealth represented a change with far-reaching
international consequences, not least for neighbouring Pakistan. Shortly
following Independence, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office
(FCO) was keen to gather news on the reaction among Pakistani diplo-
mats to the declaration of the Indian Republic. At a toast given by the
UK Ambassador to Afghanistan A. J. Gardiner in December 1949 cele-
brating the decision that the new Republic would remain part of the
Commonwealth, he ‘steer[ed] a narrow course’ in response to the Indian
Ambassador’s speech. On the one hand, Gardiner plainly wanted to
avoid offending Indians; on the other, in seeking to persuade Afghans
that Britain had only grudgingly accepted the idea of a ‘Republic’ existing
within the Commonwealth, he also ‘had to avoid giving the Pakistanis the
impression that the new Indian Constitution was regarded with such
warm approval that Pakistan might, with no loss, follow India’s example’,
and become a republic as well. Pakistani commentators, not unexpect-
edly, produced a different interpretation: the Kabul correspondent for
Dawn, for instance, reported that the ‘bubble of the Indian Republic was

32
Jivatram Bhagwandas Kripalani (1888–1982), popularly known as Acharya Kripalani,
was a Sindhi Congress politician prior to Independence, noted particularly for holding
the presidency of the Indian National Congress during the transfer of power in 1947.
Kripalani was supported by Nehru for election to the Congress presidentship in 1950,
but was defeated by Patel’s candidate P. D. Tandon.
33
Acting UK High Commissioner Pakistan, 7 September 1950, FO371/84239 UKNA.
34
Acting UK High Commissioner Pakistan, 5 September 1950, FO371/84239 UKNA.
 ‘New Constitutions’ 147

pricked’ by Gardiner’s congratulating India for electing to remain a

member of a Commonwealth that was still headed up by a monarch.35
Undoubtedly, therefore, tension in early high-level readings of the
Indian Constitution was also directly related to the emerging reality of
India and Pakistan’s deteriorating relations. British diplomats, for whom
the Indian decision to become a republic was ‘regrettable’, remained
concerned that Pakistan would be ‘infected by India’, and that together
these two South Asian countries might contaminate ‘other members of
the Commonwealth’.36 The idea of India influencing decisions taken in
Pakistan more broadly was also borne out by discussions on the latter’s
own constitutional developments, with Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan
broadcasting to the nation in May 1949 that Pakistan might well change
its relationship with the Commonwealth in precisely the same way that
India had done. For external observers, it would be impossible for any
government to remain in power in Pakistan if it did not emulate India in
this respect.37
Throughout these early post-Independence years, tensions between
India and Pakistan ran high, and were often reflected in a range of
incidents centred around formal ceremonial moments. These connected
diplomats to more everyday understandings of citizenship and belonging
while highlighting the political distance that now separated the two
countries. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, the Pakistan Consulate’s enthu-
siastic celebration of Pakistan’s first Independence Day in 1948 was
marked by a speech that talked of Muslims having been ‘obstinately
denied their birth right’ by India’s leaders.38 A year later, on the occasion
of Independence Day in 1949, Indian policemen on duty at the flag-
raising ceremony in Delhi insisted on seeing the identity card of the High
Commissioner for Pakistan and those of his staff who were attending the
anniversary celebrations. Not having the requisite document with him,
the High Commissioner immediately left.39 In 1949, anti-India riots
occurred in Karachi on the anniversary of Independence, leading police
officers to open fire on the crowd.40 According to contemporary reports,

35
UK Ambassador Kabul, 24 December 1949, FO371/ 84239 UKNA; Dawn, 5
February 1950.
36
CRO to UK High Commissioner Pakistan, Telegram, 9 November 1950, FCO371/
84258 UKNA.
37
UK High Commissioner Pakistan to CRO, Telegram, 30 October 1950, FCO371/
84258 UKNA.
38
Enclosure to Jedda Despatch 140, 17 August 1948, address delivered by Mr. Shah Jehan
Amir Kebir on the occasion of Pakistan Day at Pakistan Vice-Consulate on 14 August
1948, DO133/106 UKNA.
39
F. K. Roberts, Telegram, 17 August 1949, DO133/106 UKNA.
40
UK High Commissioner, Telegram, 17 August 1949, DO133/106 UKNA.
148 New Constitutions, New Citizens

a large number of refugees had invaded the Indian High Commissioner’s

staff hostel and insisted that an Indian flag – hoisted by Indian clerks in
the building – be taken down. The police contingent proved too small to
cope with the protestors and so, following the ineffective use of tear gas, it
resorted to firing, leading to fifteen casualties and one death. Moments of
celebration in this way became occasions on which perceptions about the
differences between India and Pakistan were exposed and reinforced,
nationally and internationally.41
Pakistan’s progress with constitution-making in the late 1940s and
early 1950s proved slow as compared with India’s, in large part because
politicians and public alike became bogged down by the process of
working out what its new identity as a place intended first and foremost
for Muslims meant in constitutional terms, and also how the two wings of
the country would work together. Jinnah’s own rhetoric in the year before
his death repeatedly emphasized the importance of the authorities main-
taining law and order, rooting out corruption and treating minorities with
‘absolute fairness’. His speech to the Pakistan Constituent Assembly,
delivered on 11 August 1947 just before Independence, has often been
held up as a guarantee of what minorities could expect in terms of personal
religious freedom in this new Muslim-majority country, though Jinnah’s
critics also point to his readiness to manipulate religious sentiment when
the need arose.42 Provincialism, it seems, was a bigger worry for Jinnah in
the immediate aftermath of Partition: speaking in particular to East Paki-
stanis but with provincial tendencies already visible in other parts of the
country including Sindh, he warned Pakistanis that, ‘As long as you do not
throw off this poison in our body politic, you will never be able to weld
yourself, mould yourself, galvanize yourself into a true nation’.43
Seven months after Jinnah died, the Pakistan Constituent Assembly
passed the Objectives Resolution on 12 March 1949, which Liaquat Ali
Khan described as ‘the most important occasion in the life of this coun-
try, next in importance only to the achievement of Independence’, and
which UK observers regarded as a ‘delicately balanced blend of Islamic
terminology and western liberal principles’.44 Contemporary discussion

41
Inward Telegram to CRO, 16 August 1949, DO133/106.
42
‘Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s first Presidential Address to the Constituent Assembly of
Pakistan (August 11, 1947)’, in G. Allana, Pakistan Movement Historical Documents
(Karachi: Department of International Relations, University of Karachi, n.d. [1969]),
pp. 407–11, www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_jinnah_assembly_
1947.html (accessed December 2018).
43
Speeches of Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah as Governor General of Pakistan
(Karachi: Sind Observer Press, 1948).
44
‘Mullahs and Their Influence in Pakistan’, 14 February 1951, DO35/3185 UKNA.
 ‘New Constitutions’ 149

triggered by this ‘historic’ resolution – in particular how it addressed the

‘Aims and Objects of the Constitution’ – centred on the extent to which
its aim was to establish Islam as the scaffolding for Pakistan’s future
constitutional arrangements, and consequently what the significance of
this reality would be for non-Muslim minorities. Liaquat Ali Khan
frequently emphasized that the ‘so-called Ulamas [sic]’ were misrepre-
senting what Islam would mean in practice within this framework, and it
apparently became so ‘fashionable’ among government supporters, ‘to
attack the “mullah element” [with] slogans of “Down with Mullaism” …
painted on thousands of walls in Karachi’, that some years later Maulana
Mohammad Akram Khan, member of the Constituent Assembly,
reflected bitterly:
Yes, it is always the fault of the mullahs. If there is water shortage in Karachi, it is
the fault of the mullahs; if Muslims fight among themselves, it is again the
mullahs who are to blame. In short, whatever goes wrong mullahs are
responsible for it.45

However, there was also criticism from a handful of Constituent Assem-

bly members – articulated by the left-leaning Punjabi politician Mian
Iftikharuddin – of the resolution’s failure to guarantee more material
forms of fairness and justice to Pakistani citizens whatever their religious
affiliation. Despite repeated assurances that the state would observe the
principles of democracy, and likewise fundamental rights such as free-
dom, equality, tolerance and social justice, Iftikharuddin warned that
‘The fight in this country is not going to be between Hindus and
Muslims. The battle in times to come will be between Hindu have-nots
and Muslim have-nots on the one hand, and Muslim and Hindu upper
and middle classes on the other’.46
All the same, broader issues of ‘sovereignty’, and who or what wielded
it, lay at the heart of much of the debate promoted by the 1949 Objectives
Resolution. Despite newspaper headlines, like those in Dawn that
claimed that ‘Sovereignty over the entire universe belongs to God
Almighty alone’, there proved to be little consensus among members of
the Constituent Assembly or Pakistanis more generally.47 As McGrath
has pointed out, for the modernizers among them, the Objectives Reso-
lution was ‘a statement of morality, not a concrete prescription for the

45
Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, Debates, Vol. 16, p. 483, 20 September 1954, cited
in Keith Callard, Pakistan: A Political Study (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957),
p. 209.
46
Grace J. Calder, ‘Constitutional Debates in Pakistan I’, The Muslim World 46 (1956),
p. 43.
47
Dawn, 2 March 1949.
150 New Constitutions, New Citizens

operation of government’; at the same time, for many ulama and other
religious leaders in the late 1940s Pakistan, it signalled ‘the end of
Jinnah’s concept of a modern national state’.48 Either way, despite stipu-
lating that the state would exercise its powers ‘through the chosen repre-
sentatives of the people’, the Constituent Assembly’s assertion that this
authority was delegated by God meant that religion occupied a very
different position within constitutional debates in Pakistan to what it
had done in India, where Nehru in the wake of Gandhi’s assassination
in early 1948 famously asserted that ‘We are planning to create a Secular
State, where one particular community or group or party will not be
permitted to usurp the rights of another’.49 But as Leonard Binder has
argued, ‘The real issue of the nature of an Islamic state was not yet
joined, nor was it even clearly defined [… the Objectives Resolution]
was in fact only an agreed formulation which both sides interpreted’
according to their own priorities.50
The Basic Principles Committee,51 established in March 1949 by the
Governor General Khawaja Nazimuddin on the advice of Liaquat Ali
Khan and tasked with preparing a more detailed constitutional frame-
work, produced its initial interim report in the form of a draft section of
the proposed constitution the following September.52 Subsequent pro-
gress, however, proved to be slow, impeded by the infrequent meeting of
the Committee during its twenty-month lifetime, and discussions were
frustratingly opaque since ‘all proceedings [of its sub-committees] were
classed as confidential and although occasional statements were issued,
they were brief in nature’.53 Public impatience mounted alongside
increasing anxiety, with even pro-government newspapers such as Dawn
calling for clarity. The prime minister responded by arguing that the task
demanded ‘an unprecedented reconstruction in the realm of political
thought and practice’.54 In November 1949, it was announced that
the work on fundamental rights was ‘almost complete’ and that the

48
Allen McGrath, The Destruction of Pakistan’s Democracy (Karachi: Oxford University
Press, 1996), p. 71.
49
Times of India, 1 February 1948. For a classic early appraisal of Indian secularism under
Nehru, see Donald E. Smith, India as a Secular State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1963).
50
Leonard Binder, Religion and Politics in Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1963), pp. 150–4.
51
The Basic Principles Committee had a president, 24 members, a steering committee and
was itself subdivided into committee with responsibility for exploring Federal and
Provincial Constitutions and Distribution of Powers; the Franchise; the Judiciary; and,
later in 1952, Baluchistan States and Tribal Areas.
52
‘Interim Report of the Basic Principles Committee of the Constituent Assembly of
Pakistan’, 17 November 1949, FO317/84258, UKNA.
53 54
McGrath, Destruction, p. 74. Dawn, 18 December 1949.
 ‘New Constitutions’ 151

constitution would be ready for ‘enforcement’ in the middle of 1951, to

be followed by a new Parliament elected in 1952.55 As Dr. I. H. Qureshi,
Federal Minister and a Bengal member of the Constituent Assembly,
explained in his presidential address to a gathering of political scientists
in Lahore in December 1949, Pakistan faced a dilemma; in short, unless
the people were entrusted with responsibility, they would never attain
political maturity. This was a risk that Qureshi concluded had to be
taken.56
In October 1950 Constituent Assembly members received another
draft for consideration, though this was ‘basically the [1935] Govern-
ment of India Act with some of the amendments to that Act made by the
Indian Independence Act, and with the Objectives Resolution as a pre-
amble’.57 East Pakistanis, many of whom by now were disenchanted with
the political reality of being dominated by West Pakistani interest groups,
opposed this interim document on the grounds that its contents repre-
sented ‘a shameless conspiracy against [their] province [by the] power-
drunk oligarchical ruling clique in Karachi [which sought] to impose a
dictatorship under the camouflage of Islam’.58 In November 1953,
in protest at a discussion in the Constituent Assembly in support of
Pakistan being made an Islamic Republic, ‘Hindu members walked
out, objecting to the general trend of the proceedings, and citing, specif-
ically, violations of minority rights through the expected provision that
the Head of State must be a Muslim’.59 Meanwhile, on the other hand,
widespread criticism of the draft was also voiced by ‘mullahs and their
friends in all parts of the country’, who viewed the proposed constitution
as too secular and western in character and objected to the Objectives
Resolution being embodied only as a ‘directive principle’.60 Liaquat
Ali Khan was accordingly forced to withdraw it in November 1950,
though not before criticisms had also been voiced in West Pakistan.
The Pakistan Times, known in the 1950s for its critical stance vis-à-vis
the central government, echoed a broader mood when it cautioned
against the over-centralization of state powers, something, it argued,
that pointed to ‘a suspicion of democratic methods and procedures’.

55
Dawn, 25 November 1949.
56
‘The Future Constitution’, Presidential Address, Political Science Conference, Lahore,
December 1949, in I. H. Qureshi, Pakistan: An Islamic Democracy (Lahore: Institute of
Islamic Culture, n.d.), p. 10, cited in A. W. Burks, ‘Constitution-Making in Pakistan’,
Political Science Quarterly 69, 4 (December 1954), p. 549.
57 58
McGrath, Destruction, p. 74. Pakistan Observer, cited ibid., p. 76.
59
Ardath W. Burks, ‘Constitution-Making in Pakistan’, Political Science Quarterly 69, 4
(December 1954), p. 560.
60
‘Mullahs and Their Influence in Pakistan’, 14 February 1951, DO35/3185 UKNA.
152 New Constitutions, New Citizens

S. C. Chattopadhyaya, leader of the Hindu bloc, was quoted at the same

time as commenting: ‘This tramples on the principles of equal rights for
all citizens and implies an inferior status for all non-Muslims’.61
Throughout this period of political transition, the kind of state that
Pakistan’s forthcoming constitution would create and the place of its
citizens within the new constitutional arrangements figured as significant
topics of discussion, inflected by awareness that developments across the
border in India were proceeding at a faster pace. In January 1950, its
timing neatly coinciding with the inauguration of the Indian Constitu-
tion, Dawn published a series of three linked articles, entitled ‘Pakistan –
Your State’, in which the author – one Hamid Khalil – set out ideas about
what constituted a citizen’s civil liberties: ‘Civil liberties form a part of the
rights of citizenship that an individual commands as a citizen of a state.
But then you may ask “what is a citizen” and what is meant by the rights
of citizenship?’ Khalil proceeded to answer his own question by explain-
ing that while some civic duties were imposed by law, ‘a good citizen
realizes the highest freedom in discharging all the moral and legal duties
of citizenship because true freedom implies the existence for every one of
the opportunity to contribute out of the richness of one’s own experience
to the furtherance of the common good’. For him, a ‘good’ citizen was
clearly not supposed to be a passive instrument at the hands of the
government. Instead citizens ‘should exert [themselves] to find out what
is conducive to the welfare of the body politic of which [they are]
a part’.62
Three years later, against the backdrop of the political crisis set in
motion by the dismissal of the country’s first Constituent Assembly in
October 1954 by the Governor General Ghulam Mohammad, wider
public reactions were revealing how ideas about citizenship could be
viewed by Pakistanis at this time. The Assembly had been dismissed
largely in response to proposed constitutional amendments that would
have removed the governor general’s power to replace the Cabinet and
also nullified the use of PRODA proceedings against politicians charged
with abusing their privileges.63 A ‘Cabinet of Talents’ was duly
appointed, headed up by the then Prime Minister Mohammad Ali Bogra,
but also containing military generals (Ayub Khan, Iskander Mirza) and
bureaucrats (Chaudhry Mohammad Ali, M. A. H. Isphani). The courts,
to which opponents of Ghulam Mohammad’s allegedly ‘unconstitu-
tional’ action turned for support, proved unhelpfully divided in their

61 62
Pakistan Times, 30 September 1950. Dawn, 8 January 1950.
63
Ian Talbot, A History of Modern South Asia: Politics, States, Diasporas (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2016), p. 175.
 ‘New Constitutions’ 153

judgements. In February 1955, the Sindh’s High Court upheld the

appeal filed by the Speaker of the Constituent Assembly Maulvi Tami-
zuddin Khan that the dissolution had been illegal on the grounds that the
necessary power to do this had not been expressly conferred on the
governor general. Moreover, there could be no working Cabinet without
a working Assembly, since Cabinet members had to be Assembly
members as stipulated in the 1935 Government of India Act. The Fed-
eral Court, however, while agreeing that there was no specific empower-
ment of the governor general that allowed him to take this action,
overruled the earlier decision on a technicality, but also stressed that if
the Constituent Assembly had performed its functions within a reason-
able period then it would have dissolved itself by 1954: in effect, ‘after
eight years of its existence it had not given the country a constitution …
thereby rendering itself completely unrepresentative of and unresponsive
to public opinion’.64 The governor general’s prerogative to intervene was
permitted, albeit retrospectively, and a sixty-member ‘constituent con-
vention’ was formed in May 1955 (elected by existing provincial assem-
blies) to ensure that any legislation was legally valid. Emergency powers
also placed a ‘blanket prohibition on all proceedings against the central
government in connection with the dismissal of the first constituent
assembly’.65 Following ‘painful negotiations’, the constitutional bill was
presented to members of this second ‘Constituent Assembly’ in early
January 1956, who approved its contents, 670 proposed amendments
notwithstanding, on 29 February. And finally on 23 March 1956 – nearly
a decade after Pakistan’s creation – its first Constitution came into
effect.66
It did not take long for Pakistan’s eagerly awaited constitution to
attract criticism, however. In response to the fresh political crisis that
was gripping both West and East Pakistan by the middle of 1956,67 a
Dawn editorial argued that ‘it would be useless now for anyone to
pretend that political stability has been achieved and that Pakistan is well
set on the road to progress. Such hopes arose with the passage of the
Constitution, and the high-sounding oaths, pledges and claims were
taken by people on face value’. Instead, ‘the Constitution has been

64
Mushtaq Ahmad, Government and Politics in Pakistan (2nd ed., Karachi: Space
Publishers, 1970), p. 31.
65
Ayesha Jalal, The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan’s Political Economy of
Defence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 204.
66
Ibid., pp. 213–4.
67
G. W. Choudhury, ‘The Constitution of Pakistan’, Pacific Affairs 29, 3 (September
1956), pp. 243–52; UK High Commissioner, Karachi, Telegram, 26 May 1956,
DO35/3407 UKNA.
154 New Constitutions, New Citizens

reduced to a farce in less than two months, the people continue to be

betrayed, and the world laughs’.68 While Dawn’s editorial was far from
neutral in its sympathies, as evidenced by its staunch support of the
Muslim League as the political institution most likely to ‘save’ Pakistan
and ensure the country’s future, its criticism exposed wider popular
frustration at the 1956 Constitution’s failure to remedy the country’s
political instabilities: deploying the scientific language of medical diag-
nosis, the newspaper claimed that
the body-politic of Pakistan has been infected by such multiple viruses that the
mere passage of a Constitution on paper has not proved an effective enough
‘antibiotic’ to cure it and restore it to normal health. Only the inherent strength of
that body-politic – what physicians call the formation of adequate antibodies or
disease-fighting organisms in the system itself – can help to conquer the disease.

While for Dawn, and those whose interests it represented, the Muslim
League remained ‘that rallying point round which healthy tissues will
grow and multiply in the body-politic and give it again enough health and
vitality to defeat and throw out eventually the pestilence with which it is
now infected’,69 the editorial’s criticism – as British observers com-
mented – was ‘an indication of the more open phase of manoeuvring
into which Pakistan politics have passed since the bringing into force of
the new Constitution’.70
Pakistan’s first constitutional experiment proved to be extremely
short-lived. Unlike the introduction of One Unit, which a year before
had amalgamated the constituent parts of West Pakistan into a single
province and which despite opposition survived intact until the break up
and subsequent reconstituting of Pakistan in 1971, its ‘democratic def-
icit’ proved its downfall. As Paula Newberg’s study of incomplete
constitution-making stretching from the 1940s to the 1990s explains,
by 1958, the 1956 Constitution had become an ‘icon of political fail-
ure’71: in her words, it ‘ushered in a short period of constitutional rule
but the constitution’s roots were also its shortcomings, which in turn
compounded political instabilities across the country’. In return for the
creation of a powerful presidency, limited parliamentary rule and little
challenge to the writ of either the bureaucracy or the military, Pakistanis
received a set of fundamental rights and judicial autonomy, at least in
theory.72 On 7 October 1958, following two and a half years of steadily

68 69
Dawn, 24 May 1956. Ibid.
70
UK High Commissioner to CRO, 26 May 1956, DO35/3407 UKNA.
71
Paula Newberg, Judging the State: Courts and Constitutional Politics in Pakistan
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 71.
72
Ibid., p. 69.
 ‘New Constitutions’ 155

more unstable civilian politics and alarmed by the looming prospect of

national elections, the military intervened and staged a successful coup.
Newspapers the following day contained President Iskander Mirza’s
pronouncement justifying the imposition of martial law. In his view,
‘the vast majority of the people no longer [had] any confidence in the
present system of government’, and Pakistan’s integrity had been ser-
iously compromised by the ‘ruthlessness of traitors and political adven-
turers whose selfishness, thirst for power and unpatriotic conduct’ could
not be restrained.73 Clearing up the mess created by civilian politicians
was the order of the day, and some foreign observers even raised the
suggestion that Pakistanis might be willing to put up with a military
administration as long as it was reasonably ‘clean’ and ‘efficient’.74 All
the same, many ordinary residents of Karachi, particularly those with
refugee backgrounds, viewed ‘Operation Cleanup’ – launched by the city
police to reduce serious crime in the aftermath of the military takeover –
with grave misgivings, and stories of police brutality circulated widely in
the city.75
As these constitution-building efforts in India and Pakistan – and
reactions to them whether from Indians, Pakistanis or foreign observers –
demonstrate, constitutions in the late 1940s and 1950s acquired huge
symbolic as well as concrete significance for contemporaries, who often
made sense of what they contained in terms of their own rights and
responsibilities as citizens. Arvind Elangovan, in making his case for a
non-nationalist approach towards the Indian Constitution, has main-
tained that by ‘separating nation-making from constitution-making, the
field of constitutional and political history’ becomes ‘a richer and more
informative resource to understand the complex postcolonial develop-
ments in India’.76 The same point could be made about the context
within which Pakistan made (or failed to make) progress with regard to
producing a constitution in the decade that followed Independence. And
this also proved to be the case when it came to how India and Pakistan’s
new citizens flexed their constitutional muscles as voters going, or not
going, to the polls over this same period.

73
‘Martial Law Proclaimed’, Civil and Military Gazette, 8 October 1958, cited in ibid.,
p. 71.
74
UK High Commissioner, Despatch 20, 14 April 1958, DO35/8936 UKNA.
75
Despatch 1206, 27 June 1958, 790D.00.6-2758, USNA. For more details on the impact
of martial law on life in Karachi, see Sarah Ansari, Life after Partition: Migration,
Community and Strife in Sindh, 1947–1962 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2005),
pp. 181–91.
76
Elangovan, ‘The Making of the Indian Constitution’, p. 1.
156 New Constitutions, New Citizens

‘New Citizens’
Give way,
Listen to the thunderous roar of the chariot of time,
Vacate the throne, the people are coming.77

In How India Became Democratic (her detailed exploration of the prepar-

ations underpinning India’s first general election over the winter of
1951–2) Ornit Shani argues that the preparation of electoral rolls on
the basis of universal franchise, ahead of as opposed to following the
promulgation of the Constitution, produced struggles for citizenship,
often driven from below by Indians of modest means.78 While tremen-
dous administrative efforts went into the making of the universal fran-
chise for the largest electorate in democratic history, the drawing up of
the actual electoral rolls themselves informed the process of constitution-
making from the ground upwards. From as early as November 1947, the
Constituent Assembly Secretariat set in motion the preparation of draft
electoral rolls on the basis of universal franchise, implementing the first
constitutional promise to be fulfilled by the new Indian Republic, namely
the principle that every adult citizen would have the right to vote, with the
aim of holding of ‘fresh general elections as early as possible after the new
Constitution [came] into force’.79 Moreover, during the actual prepar-
ation of the rolls, Indians – as Shani explains – conceived of their voting
right as a basic constitutional guarantee, and hence various citizens’
organizations were established in order ‘to safeguard the right of fran-
chise’ that it promised.80 Numerous other Indians meanwhile fought to
get their names entered on the roll so as to ensure their voting rights
as citizens.
Consequently, citizenship was directly identified from the outset with
casting a vote, not an action that the vast majority of newly enfranchised
Indians or Pakistanis had directly performed before Independence.
Under the 1935 Government of India Act – the last piece in the colonial
legal ‘jigsaw puzzle’ that subsequently shaped constitutional arrange-
ments directly in India and Pakistan after 1947 – suffrage had been
extended to a little more than thirty million people or about a fifth of
the adult population, including a small number of women. Following
Independence, elections – even when they did not take place – were
extremely symbolic of the changed political postcolonial reality. This

77
Dinkar, ‘Vacate the Throne’.
78
Ornit Shani, How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal
Franchise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
79 80
Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 64.
 ‘New Citizens’ 157

chapter’s second section, therefore, builds on Shani’s insights with

respect to developments in India to explore further the parallel processes
at work on the two sides of the new Indo–Pakistan border as people
engaged, or sought to engage, with their new responsibilities as enfran-
chised citizens. At the same time, the authorities – in both countries –
embarked on what seemed like a perpetual task of counting heads, often
but not exclusively in preparation for the conducting of these elections.
In different ways, early post-Independence exercises in number-
crunching brought Indian and Pakistani citizens into closer proximity
with the state at the everyday level, helping to embed notions of what
citizenship entailed – at least in theory – from the perspective of both.
In the first Lok Sabha polls held between October 1951 and February
1952, India possessed around 176 million voters, out of an overall
population of about 360 million. But following the relative lack of tri-
umphalism between 1948 and 1950, political figures across the spectrum
expressed doubts about the readiness of India’s largely rural society for
universal suffrage. None of this was lost on Sukumar Singh, author of
Report on the First General Elections of India, 1951–2, who was the first
Chief Election Commissioner. Eighty-five per cent of the electorate after
all could neither read nor write. Each had to be registered and polling
stations set up (see Figure 4.2). In addition, the size of the Indian general
election was unprecedented at a global level. As one American observer,
Richard Park, wrote, this all added up to ‘a problem of colossal propor-
tions’. There were to be c. 25,000 candidates across central and state
assemblies for 4,500 seats (500 for the central parliament and rest for the
provincial parliaments), and 224,000 polling booths, with two million
steel ballot boxes, made from 8,200 tonnes of steel; 16,500 clerks were
appointed to collate electoral rolls; 380,000 reams of paper used for
printing the rolls; and there were 56,000 presiding officers, with a further
280,000 helpers and 224,000 policemen. Nehru himself travelled a total
of 25,000 miles in all, criss-crossing the country on the Congress cam-
paign trail. The voting stations were spread over more than one million
square miles. In the case of remote hill villages, even bridges had to be
specially constructed.
Many women did not wish to give their own names at the voting
stations, preferring to be referred to as A’s wife, or B’s mother, which
resulted in some 2.8 million women having to be struck off the list.81 Yet,
despite the high levels of illiteracy in India, the turnout was around
60 per cent (see Figure 4.3). Bombay – the city with the greatest density

81
Ibid., p. 46.
158 New Constitutions, New Citizens

Figure 4.2 Parliamentary elections, Delhi, January 1952.

Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images

Figure 4.3 A queue of voters, India, January 1952.

Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images
 ‘New Citizens’ 159

of polling stations – saw participation levels of c. 70 per cent, and in

Travancore-Cochin as a whole, the level of participation reached nearly
80 per cent. Despite the often large distances involved and the
inaccessibility of some villages, the turnout among rural voters living
in vast constituencies (some of which had populations of 350,000 plus)
was higher than in towns. Election symbols were used to help the
illiterate – a bullock cart for one party, an elephant for another, a hut
for a third.82 Multiple ballot boxes, one for each party, were used to
prevent mistakes by voters, and Indian scientists had developed an
indelible ink to foil impersonation that involved the use of some
390,000 phials of ink. A documentary on the franchise and its functions
and the duty of the electorate was shown in thousands of cinemas in
1951, and many more voters were reached through broadcasts from
All-India Radio.83 In UP alone, there were 12,000 polling stations and
50,000 booths. The voting itself eventually took place over four days
and each of UP’s fifty-one districts was split into four sectors with votes
cast in rotation. It was estimated that around half of the state’s total
police force of 55,000 was engaged in the maintenance of law and
order.84
There was an array of parties across the spectrum, albeit dominated by
the Congress Party. Nehru’s election speeches, delivered to around two
million people at some 300 mass meetings, declared ‘war on communal-
ism’, and made good mileage out of Congress’s leadership of the free-
dom struggle and the party’s links to Gandhi. In this sense, Congress
very much relied upon ‘reputation’ as opposed to ‘issues’, for which the
large-scale symbolic events between 1948 and 1951 were all the more
crucial. Some of the other parties were drawn into this strategy, including
the Socialist Party of Jayaprakash Narayan, which accused the Congress
of deserting the ideals of older Gandhians, and the Hindu right-wing
party, the Jana Sangh. The latter stood for the reunification of Pakistan
with India, suspected India’s Muslims to be a problematic minority and
criticized the Congress for appeasing them. However, other parties,
particularly those on the left, campaigned directly on socio-economic
issues. The Scheduled Castes Federation, led by B. R. Ambedkar,
accused the Congress of ignoring the predicament of India’s poorest
and most disadvantaged. The Communist Party of India (CPI) too had
resurfaced after the initial post-Independence crackdown by the Indian

82
Archibald Nye, ‘The Indian Elections’, Despatch 32, 20 February 1952, DO133/
114 UKNA.
83
Ibid.
84
‘Police Arrangements in UP during Elections’, National Herald, 13 September 1951.
160 New Constitutions, New Citizens

authorities. And added to the list in the provincial elections were regional
parties based on local languages and ethnicities. Posters and emblems
were everywhere to be seen – in shops, on boards, on the old colonial
statues and in Bengal a common practice was to paint ‘Vote for Con-
gress’ on the backside of stray cows.85
Independent India may now be commonly viewed as one of the
world’s most participatory democracies, but this was not how its first
general election was anticipated in 1951. Contemporary observer,
Penderel Moon, for one, suggested that it was an ‘absurd farce’ watch-
ing ‘millions of illiterate people registering their vote’.86 Until the results
of the Congress victory were known, even Nehru himself possessed
doubts, fearing that the noise of propaganda would drown out quality
debate, and lead to the selection of ‘dumb’ or ‘dictatorial leaders’. Not
only that, Congress also found itself having to work alongside the same
bureaucracy against which Nehru had fought in the lead up to Inde-
pendence in 1947. The new US Ambassador to India, Chester Bowles,
also changed his view: from initially thinking that a country such as
India would need a benevolent dictatorship for a period, he came to
believe that illiteracy was no bar to ‘intelligent voting’. Of the relatively
small number (1,250) of election offences reported, a good proportion
involved canvassing within one hundred meters of a polling station.
And it was surmised that some of the offenders could have been
bovine.87
As it turned out, election observers reported relatively little election
fraud or what they labelled as ‘corruption’. Shortly after the results were
announced, Nehru was quick to point out to his UP colleague Pant that
he had ‘received a large number of fresh complaints about the elections’
there. On talking to the Election Commissioner, it seems that Nehru had
found the large and sprawling UP to have been ‘the most problematic
state’. Evidently, quotidian practices bound up in the polls there were
quite unusual in some cases:
One such remarkable complaint was that the UP Govt [sic] had not used the
Godrej voting boxes, but instead boxes made locally through cottage industries.
Many of them were falling apart, and the lid was coming off. Also, when opened,
it was found that some of the voting papers were in tied bundles as though they
had been put in together and not separately.88

There was, however, a much more significant development, namely an

emerging politics of corruption/anti-corruption allegation centred on

85
Nye, ‘The Indian Elections’. 86
Ibid. 87
Ibid.
88
Nehru to Pant, 9 February 1952, Pant Papers, Reel 1 NMML.
 ‘New Citizens’ 161

candidates themselves, mostly focussed around black market activities,

but also involving accusations of nepotism and alleged association with
communal organizations. Much of this political discussion developed
through two processes: first, internal party political rivalry and a sense
of degeneration within the Congress, and, second (though connected to
the first process), a broader and more extensive popular politics of anti-
corruption and civic protest that, as we have discussed in earlier chapters,
had emerged in India in the years since Independence.
The Congress’s many attempts to consolidate its power in India – from
its original decision to ‘cut off the diseased limb’ (namely Pakistan) in
1947, to its use of state ceremony and spectacle – now paid off. It won
these first elections comfortably. However, the ‘first past the post’ system
did show that the party was not fully representative. Congress secured
only about 45 per cent of the popular vote for the central parliament, but
ended up with control of almost 75 per cent of the seats: the proportion
in the state elections represented 42 per cent of the popular vote, which
translated into 68 per cent of the seats. In eighteen out of twenty-two
assemblies, Congress emerged with a majority.89 But this provided some
surprise victories, such as in Partition-afflicted areas of the Punjab and
Bengal, and in Bombay. All the same, twenty prominent Congress min-
isters lost their seats, the party held only slender majorities in Hyderabad
and Rajasthan, and possessed no overall majority in Travancore-Cochin,
Orissa, Madras and PEPSU.90 In some respects, therefore, the election
outcome signalled key challenges for the party in the future, especially in
relation to developments on its left. In others ways, the results threw up
surprises, with, for instance, the almost total elimination of right-wing
parties that had been initially buoyed up by popular opposition to the
creation of Pakistan and by the accompanying demonization of Muslim
minorities in North India.
The situation in Andhra in the south and UP to the north provide
contrasting but related images of what India’s first general election meant
for many of its ordinary citizens. In the seven districts of Andhra that
voted overwhelmingly for the CPI, the failure of Congress candidates was
attributed to charges of corruption and importantly a failure to ‘get out’
to voters, especially women.91 This response strongly reflected the kinds
of discourses produced in both the national and regional newspapers
focussed around popular disengagement from the Indian state, resulting
from low-level administrative corruption, as explored in Chapter 2.
Unquestionably, there was a great deal of fear within officialdom about

89
Nye, ‘The Indian Elections’. 90
Ibid.
91
V. C. Martin, ‘Andhra Goes Communist’, 16 February 1952, DO133/114 UKNA.
162 New Constitutions, New Citizens

the relative scale of the left parties – especially the CPI in South Indian
states and in Bengal. This was particularly the case in Travancore-
Cochin, which later became Kerala, but also in Madras and
Hyderabad.92 Communist organizations and parties had been banned
in Bengal from March 1948, and had been engaged in ongoing armed
struggle in Hyderabad (which by the time of the elections had become
part of Andhra Pradesh) right up to the eve of the poll itself.93 In
Hyderabad, the relative success of the CPI was directly related to one
of the central problems of early postcolonial state governments in India –
that of dissatisfaction with food procurement and rationing. For instance,
about 45 per cent of the rural population of West Godavari in 1951 were
landless labourers who received a ration of around 6 oz of rice through
government shops, in stark contrast to cultivators and small landlords
who were permitted to keep back paddy at 12 oz per adult.94 Added to
this, as the left-wing press warned on Independence Day that year, was
frustration driven by police suppression of communists in the years
following Partition, the apparent stalling of linguistic reorganization by
the ruling Congress regime and a widespread sense of ‘administrative
corruption’ linked as well to Congress governance.95 The Praja Party
only fared reasonably well in Madras, but the Socialist Party, another
breakaway from the Congress, was limited to making a mark in Bihar.
In UP, meanwhile, the Socialists had proved to be a more significant
force than the CPI and so had high hopes of electoral success, but in
1948 only around 5 per cent (12 out of 200) of Congress UP Assembly
members moved over to their ranks.96 By 1951, however, there had been
significant defections among the rank-and-file Congress workers.97 Most
importantly, both the Socialists and disgruntled sections within Congress
itself – as in the South – fed off the scandals surrounding everyday
corruption. In the summer of 1951, to take one instance, there had been
a series of exchanges in the UP Assembly during the lead-up to the
elections, in particular focussed on a link between Congress ministers
and sugar producers, in which the former received payments to use
influence in cases brought against them. MLA Khan Chand Gautam
claimed that the Civil Supplies minister had engaged in a kind of ‘broker-
age’ and charged a levy on the sugar production of individual industrial-
ists: for Gautam, this ‘amounted to asking for a share in the excess prices

92
G. E. Crombie to Young, 26 February 1952, DO113/114 UKNA.
93
Taylor Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India (London: Routledge, 2010),
pp. 161–8.
94 95
G. E. Crombie to Victor, 26 February 1952, DO133/114 UKNA. Ibid.
96
A. C. B. Symon to Rumbold, 6 April 1948, DO133/128 UKNA.
97
‘300 Resign from Congress in Eastern UP’, National Herald, 22 August 1951.
 ‘New Citizens’ 163

that the sugar manufacturers charged from the consumers … Cases

against some industrialists had been hushed up on receipt of contribu-
tions to the Congress funds, he charged’.98 In an accusatory 1951 debate,
Raja Ram Shastri (Socialist) threw doubt on whether the elections would
be conducted fairly, arguing that government officials were already sup-
porting the ministry in power, especially in court cases centred on
corruption. Shastri then read out an official letter from the District
Supply Officer of Rae Bareli addressed to the Halwais’ (Sweetmakers)
Association in which the District Supply Officer had told them that he
would agree to distribution of the sugar quota through their association
only if the District Congress Committee passed a resolution to that
effect. ‘What does it amount to’, Shastri argued, ‘except giving a free
hand to the District Congress Committee to coerce the halwais? Does it
not prove that the administration is acting as a tool of the party?’99
As the pre-election war of words intensified, Begum Aizaz Rasool,
leader of the opposition, through the mechanism of an amendment to
the Assembly’s thanks to the address of the governor, regretted that no
mention had been made to any measure that the government intended to
take to eradicate widespread corruption and nepotism and the growing
insecurity of life in rural areas. Nor had it introduced schemes to bring
down the prices of consumer goods. Assembly member and veteran
nationalist UP politician S. K. D. Paliwal then moved an amendment
seeking to add twenty-one grievances of the public against the govern-
ment – the main ones relating to food, cloth, houses, alleged police
tyranny, unemployment, poverty, increasing cost of living and inad-
equate pay, and dearness allowance for lower-level government employ-
ees. Paliwal argued that in the Gorakhpur district of UP alone hundreds
of people were unable to procure even shrouds for burial purposes and
that growing unemployment was responsible for many cases of suicide in
the state.100 Accusations of corruption in supply and requisitioning were
also linked to another controversy involving public clashes with the
administration – in this case, what was described in the Assembly as
the ‘Hardoi Incident’. Here, a number of women in villages of the district
had brought allegations of police rape in the summer of 1951. A police
constable who then went to issue a court summons was beaten up and his
gun snatched. On receipt of this information, thirty-six people were

98
National Herald, 23 August 1951.
99
‘Assembly Debates Governor’s Address – Sharp Congress-Praja Party Exchanges’,
National Herald, 22 August 1951.
100
‘Food Relief Urged for Eastern Districts – Discussion on Governor’s Address in
Council’, National Herald, 23 August 1951.
164 New Constitutions, New Citizens

arrested.101 Paliwal remained consistent in his critique of the Congress

over the months leading up to the election, arguing that the regime had
failed in the areas of health, poverty and food security and communal
relations, and was unable to establish either a welfare or a police state.102
Much of this politicking in the run-up to the first Indian general
election was geared towards cross-party accusation about influence with
the bureaucracy, and the sense in which the ‘corruption’ of the Congress
leadership distanced it from the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. In a
debate about possible deaths from starvation in north Garhwal linked to
existing food policies, the Food Minister Chaudhury Charan Singh was
asked to explain how permission had been given by the administration for
a 300-strong dinner for the State Congress Committee, supplied with
controlled foodstuffs. By contrast, the Food Commissioner had appar-
ently refused to permit the organizers of the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party
Conference in Lucknow to entertain more than forty-nine people.103
The sense of disillusionment of many was summed up by K. K. Malaviya
who explained his resignation from the UP government with the
following words in a speech in the Assembly:
The history of the past four years of Congress rule has been undoubtedly a history
of creating problems instead of solving them. It is common knowledge that
corruption and black marketing have unfortunately become the normal
incidents of our social economy today. In meeting the bare necessities of life,
lying and cheating have become inevitable for you and for me in the existing set-
up … It will be no exaggeration to say that Congress today stands very well-
isolated from the people whom it aspires to serve … Nepotism and jobbery have
now become the warp and woof of its texture … No state minister can be sure,
today, of the prompt and ungrudging execution of Government programmes by
many of those who have to do it … A Minister of the state Government, who does
not belong to the power group, must always be ready to be obstructed, thwarted
and even slighted. The services have been made conscious of the precarious lot of
such minister and outcastes. They can never be sure that of their orders being
obeyed and carried out substantially.104
There was little doubt that the pre-election political environment in UP
had encouraged forms of patronage, which prefigured sectional groups
support for particular leaders. In Etawah, for instance, the working
committee of the UP Momin Conference set up a committee for granting

101
Ibid.
102
‘Paliwal Asks People to Vote for the Praja Party’, National Herald, 5 September 1951,
p. 2.
103
‘No Starvation Deaths – Gupta’s Denial in Assembly’, National Herald,
25 August 1951.
104
‘Slackness and Corruption in State Services – Malaviya Gives Reasons for Resignation –
Use of Govt. Machine for Party Cause’, National Herald, 25 August 1951.
 ‘New Citizens’ 165

scholarships to students and publicly expressed confidence in Nehru.

The conference concluded with a request to increase the government
yarn quota.105
However, despite these claims of influence and the deterioration of
India’s principal political party, there was a sense in the final months
before the election that exercising the vote was an exercise in rights
assertion itself. The newspapers were filled with discussions of how to
overcome the structural challenges of the electorate – illiteracy, the
distances and extend of the electoral operation itself, and the problems
of election expenses.106 M. N. Roy, one of India’s leading Communists
from the 1920s onwards, argued in the press that, given the inexperience
and illiteracy of the population, and the problems of corruption, it
was likely that a range of independent candidates would be elected.107
However, adversity during the electoral process was also turned into an
opportunity to mobilize new and disadvantaged constituencies too. On
11 September 1951, over a dozen women’s organizations, under the
auspices of the Mahila Matadhikar Samiti (and Rameshwari Nehru108)
urged the ‘restoration’ of voting rights to ‘disenfranchised’ women. Mrs.
Durga Bal, MP, addressing the convention pointed out that nearly three
million women had been struck off the electoral rolls due to defective
enumeration as a result of which they were in imminent danger of being
deprived of their rights. Mrs. Manmoham Sehgal proposed a resolution,
seconded by Mrs. Sharda Bhargava, which placed on record this
convention’s
emphatic sense of protest against the manner in which millions of women of India
have been summarily deprived of their just and legitimate rights of vote at the first
general elections of free India. The Constitution of India guarantees franchise to
every adult person but due to defective enumeration by the employees of the
election departments of several states and negligence of their officers, the names
of millions of women have been for no fault of theirs, declared invalid at the
eleventh hour by an order of the Election Commissioner.109

Events unfolded differently in Pakistan. Unlike Indians, Pakistanis did

not have the opportunity to take part in a general election until 1970,
nearly two decades after Indians had first gone to the polls as full-fledged

105
‘Momin Support for Nehru’, National Herald, 7 September 1951.
106
‘Election Expenses’, National Herald, 16 September 1951.
107
M. N. Roy, ‘To Intelligent Voters’, National Herald, Magazine Section,
16 September 1951.
108
Rameshwari Nehru (1886–1966) was a social worker in colonial and post-
Independence India. She was married to Brijlal Nehru, cousin of Jawaharlal Nehru.
109
‘Restoration of Voting Right: Demand by Delhi Women’s Delegation’, National Herald,
12 September 1951.
166 New Constitutions, New Citizens

Figure 4.4 Local elections, Pakistan, December 1959.

Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images

citizens. Direct comparisons with the experience of voting in India

during the first ten years following Independence are consequently
impossible to draw. At the same time, people in Pakistan spent much
of the 1950s actively anticipating elections, and occasionally participated
in them at a provincial or lower level (see Figure 4.4). So while the scale
of Pakistan’s tentative experiments in democratic participation was con-
siderably smaller than their Indian equivalents, the significance invested
in them in terms of hope and expectation was equally high. In many
ways, therefore, the context was more similar on this side of the new
border than is often acknowledged. For both the Pakistani state and its
new citizens, simply preparing to vote was regarded as a ‘rite of passage’
as far as acquiring citizenship was concerned, with enormous emphasis
placed on putting the necessary electoral ‘scaffolding’ in place: voter
registration, for instance, assumed an enhanced meaning, particularly
as it took place against the backdrop of the fallout from Partition’s longer
term demographic impact. All the same, while ‘institution-building’ on
the scale demanded by the creation of a new state virtually from scratch
was a slow and at times painful process, the challenges created by Parti-
tion offered some practical advantages in that this human ‘emergency’
provided opportunities for the newly created state to embed itself in the
lives of its citizens, whether they were refugees or already living in the
 ‘New Citizens’ 167

places that had geographically become Pakistan. Moreover, environmen-

tal crises such as severe flooding first in Sindh in 1948 and then in the
Punjab in 1951 provided fresh opportunities for the state to promote
itself in terms of its support for those affected by these natural disasters.
It was evident to observers in the years following Partition that the new
Pakistani state had inherited a deficit when it came to the number of
experienced staff required to fill its bureaucracy. Pakistan inherited only
around 100 former ICS (Indian Civil Service) officers, of whom only a
small fraction had any experience of working at the higher rungs of the
administrative ladder: only ‘one of them had been a joint secretary, and
five or seven deputy secretaries in the government of undivided India’.110
According to former US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who visited
Pakistan during her round-the-world trip in 1952, the ‘wonderful people
at the top in Pakistan’ were ‘handicapped by not having enough trained
civil servants in the lower cadres’.111 Competition between locals and
refugees over who got what jobs within the new bureaucratic infrastruc-
ture, and with what terms of employment attached, caused repeated
friction. When in November 1950, the Sindh Ministry changed its selec-
tion and promotion procedures, by no longer recognizing years of service
in territory that was now in the Indian Union, many refugee government
servants regarded this as a huge injustice, particularly since, for them,
their ‘experience and ability had proved an invaluable asset to the pro-
vince [Sindh] during a period of national emergency [in the wake of
Partition]’. In the words of a sympathetic newspaper editorial, fault lay
primarily with provincial politicians: ‘The rules governing the Permanent
Services should have complete immunity against the evils of politicians’
vagaries. The members of the Provincial Services should not be made to
feel that their fate hangs in the balance every time there is a change in
Ministerial setup. This will result in complete demoralisation of the
services’.112
In India, as we have seen, the drawing up of electoral rolls was ‘posited
as ambitious and complex but, ultimately, a concrete technical and
practical undertaking’.113 It was a similar scenario in Pakistan. To judge
from available records, the Pakistani state together with its civil servants
spent a great deal of time from the late 1940s onwards trying to work out

110
Liaquat Ali Khan’s defence of Government decision to retain some British officials in
key positions, Constituent Assembly (Legislative) Debates, 1948, Vol. I, pp. 279–80, cited
in Ahmad, Government and Politics in Pakistan, p. 81.
111 112
Dawn, 12 April 1952. Dawn, 10 April 1952.
113
Ornit Shani, ‘Making India’s Democracy: Rewriting the Bureaucratic Colonial
Imagination in the Preparation of the First Elections’, Comparative Studies of South
Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36, 1 (May 2016), p. 90.
168 New Constitutions, New Citizens

who was living where and in what precise numbers as part of preparations
for possible voting. From periodic headcounts throughout the 1950s
driven by the need to quantify the whereabouts of displaced refugees in
cities such as Karachi, to Pakistan’s first national census in 1951,
number-counting in this fluid context assumed political – nation-
building – significance. According to one piece of expert advice received
by the Indian authorities as early as October 1947, ‘an electoral roll [was]
a statutory document, while a census [was] a “useful inventory”, and the
implications of the two tasks [were] very different’.114 But despite this
distinction, which was also recognized by officials in Pakistan, the first
national census in the latter which was announced in 1948 and carried
out in early 1951, provided (with still no general election in the offing) an
alternative way of projecting the role of the state alongside communi-
cating the responsibilities associated with citizenship.
Studies on the purpose of censuses usually emphasize how far they
enable the state to view and quantify society: for Benedict Anderson, in
Imagined Communities, they represent the way in which the colonial state
imagined its dominion.115 But from the perspective of those being
surveyed, particularly among populations with low literacy rates, the act
of carrying out a census brings citizens face-to-face with the state as the
representatives of the latter engage in recording the necessary informa-
tion about the individual circumstances of the former. This was certainly
what happened in Pakistan (and India too) in the early 1950s. With
literacy low, the process of recording relied directly on volunteers –
frequently praised for their ‘patriotic’ service116 – taking the state along
with its census questionnaires directly into people’s homes.117 In the case
of the 1951 Pakistan census, some quarter of a million volunteers –
comprised mainly of students, government employees, Muslim League
workers and Muslim League National Census Guards – were deployed
by the authorities, who divided the country into roughly 160,000 blocks,
each containing approximately 100 dwellings, with 10 blocks making up
a ‘circle’, and every ten circles a ‘Charge’. These enumerators, as they
were called, went from house to house with a supply of individual
questionnaires, though not everyone had to answer all twenty-five

114
Ibid., p. 88.
115
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991 ed.), chapter 10, ‘Census, Map, Museum’,
pp. 163–85.
116
Dawn, 11 February 1951.
117
Governor General Khwaja Nazimuddin was the first person to be counted, followed by
those in Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan’s household.
 ‘New Citizens’ 169

questions as people in rural areas were asked fewer than their counter-
parts living in towns.
On ‘Census Night’ itself – 28 February – the streets of Karachi, for
instance, were reported as completely deserted: ‘a hush, ruffled only by
gentle knocks and whispers of the enumerators, prevailed’.118 Special
police arrangements were in place for patrolling the streets during the
voluntary curfew. By midnight, 3,000 enumerators, permitted to hire
rickshaws at government expense, had spread throughout the city,
charged with tracking down anyone who might have been left out of
the count because they lacked a permanent lodging place. Similarly in
Lahore, the hunt was on for the city’s floating homeless population that
usually spent its night on footpaths on in other places not on record with
the municipal authorities. There were similar curfews in Dacca and
Chittagong. According to contemporary reports, people living in rural
areas proved easier to count; it was towns and cities that posed greater
difficulties. In contrast to the so-called illiterates who apparently needed
little persuasion to provide answers to the census questions, members of
the urban intelligentsia posed more of a challenge to enumerators, with
one ‘Secretary to the Government [having] to be visited eight times at his
house and office before his statement could be recorded’.119
All the same, the Pakistani authorities had to work hard to get the
census taken seriously. Official rhetoric and public responses offer insight
into wider processes at work in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Time and
again officials repeated the message that for this ‘corporate national job’
to be successful, people would have to provide accurate information
about themselves and their families.120 Hence, addressing a public meet-
ing in the Federal Capital on the first day of the operation (9 February
1951), Census Commissioner E. H. Slade, a British expert who had
recently worked with displaced populations in post-war Germany, called
for wholehearted public cooperation. Both he and the then Adminis-
trator of Karachi, Syed Hashim Raza, argued strongly that the census
results were essential for planning how to build the new state:
Pakistan is still young and impressionable; its future plans and programmes are
still on the anvil and its constitution still unshaped. We do not have to repair,
renovate or demolish an old construction. We have to raise an altogether new
edifice, a task which, although stupendous in itself, is less intricate and more

118
Dawn, 10 February 1951.
119
First Census of Pakistan 1951: Administrative Report, Part Two: The Reports of the
Provincial Superintendents of Census Operations (Karachi: Government of Pakistan
Press, 1953), chapter 14 ‘Sind’, pp. 192–3.
120
Dawn, 20 June 1950.
170 New Constitutions, New Citizens

straight [sic]. Census results … are destined to play a significant role in our future
development schemes and in shaping a near-utopian society.121
Federal Minster of the Interior Khwaja Shahabuddin in a Radio Pakistan
broadcast likewise drew attention to the census as an exercise in collect-
ive civic responsibility:
The gathering of all this information is a work that is being undertaken by a large
body of unpaid workers. For the most part, they are the normal servants of the
government who have to do this extra job as part of their already onerous duties
but they have been reinforced by large numbers of non-official voluntary workers.
To all these, Pakistan owes a debt of gratitude for their self-less labours.122
Shahabuddin went on to instruct his listeners as follows (though how
many will have necessarily understood the English in which he was
speaking is debatable):
Throughout most of Pakistan the month of February will see them very busily
employed. When these gentlemen visit our homes … we must treat them with
courtesy and respect as men who are doing a vitally important job which will be of
the greatest help to everybody. We must see that the information we give is to the
best of our knowledge the real truth regarding the census questions. A census slip
is to be made out for every person, young and old, man or woman, wherever they
may be in Pakistan, and also for Pakistanis who at the time of the census happen
to be abroad.
And the minister took similar pains to refute popular misconceptions that
any information provided would be used to disadvantage individuals or
that the census would arrive at a preconceived result: ‘We are out to get
at the truth whatever it may be … and I am sure that the people of
Pakistan and particularly the census officers will ensure that everyone is
included once and only once, and that slips are not made out for non-
existent people’. To the volunteer enumerators themselves, Shahabud-
din drew their attention to the need ‘for a tactful and friendly approach’;
census officers, he explained, had ‘to act with discretion and realise that
the information with which [they were] entrusted by the citizen [had] to
be an inviolable secret and disclosed to no one except the proper census
authorities’.123 Equally, the authorities appealed to all employers, busi-
nesses and offices, whose members of staff were acting as census officials,
to excuse them from work and treat their absence as being ‘on duty’.

121
‘Social Significance of the Census’, Dawn, 25 February 1951.
122
Pakistan Times, 10 February 1951.
123
Ibid. For a more detailed study of the carrying out of Pakistan's first census in Sindh, see
Sarah Ansari, ‘Pakistan’s 1951 Census: State-Building in Post-Partition Sindh’, South
Asia 39, 4 (2016), pp. 820–40.
 ‘New Citizens’ 171

Organizing and administering direct elections at the provincial and

municipal level, therefore, drew on the same combination of state rhet-
oric and citizen assistance, and, thus, provided officially endorsed oppor-
tunities for the state first to project and then to enact its recently acquired
authority.
More generally, and in a similar fashion to the challenge facing Indian
authorities in the run-up to the first election there, drawing up electoral
rolls – whether at city, province or (optimistically as it turned out)
national level – tested the Pakistan state’s capacity to identify, verify
and record those of its new citizens deemed eligible to vote. Elections
were repeatedly postponed, often ostensibly because the authorities
proved unable to carry out the necessary preparations in time, but also
thanks, on many occasions, to official concerns about the elections’
possible outcomes. In the case of Karachi Municipal Corporation
(KMC) elections scheduled for April–May 1953, 400 enumerators –
200 male and 200 female – had begun the previous July to prepare the
necessary electoral rolls. The deadline for preliminary lists of voters was
the middle of December 1952. These were then made available for
public scrutiny, and once any corrections had been made, the final
version was prepared.124 One problem reported early on – echoing a
similar reluctance among Indian women – was shyness on the part of
potential female voters who were not prepared to provide their names
and ages even when approached by female enumerators.125 And though
this was only a municipal election, it was taking place in the federal heart
of the new country, and so campaigners sought to rally voters by describ-
ing the Karachi polls as ‘a test for the nation and not a reason for
despondency and discouragement’.126 But this heightened reality failed
to live up to expectations. According to one contemporary report, ‘per-
fection in the use of one of the major instruments of representative
democracy – free elections fairly conducted – has not yet been attained
in Pakistan, if the situation resulting from recent balloting for members
of the Karachi Municipal Corporation is any indication’; after all the talk
beforehand about fair and well-organized elections, ‘in many wards,
polling arrangements were not ready in time, and there [were] many
complaints about mismanagement and inefficiency’.127 Accounts of pro-
cedural maladministration produced a storm of protest, and appeals were
made for re-polling in seven of the twenty-eight wards. Both independent

124 125
Dawn, 2 July 1952. Dawn, 26 July 1952.
126
US Embassy Despatch 950, 18 April 1953, 790d.00/4-1853 USNA.
127
UK High Commission, Karachi, Review of Events in Sind, Karachi and Baluchistan,
No. 9, 21 April–4 May 1953, DO35/5300 UKNA.
172 New Constitutions, New Citizens

and Muslim League candidates complained that polling booths were

either not in place or closed at the scheduled voting times.128
But for all the evident flaws and shortcomings associated with them,
municipal elections were at least conducted in Karachi in the early
1950s, unlike in Lahore, Pakistani Punjab’s largest city, where they had
last been held as long ago as 1946. This lengthy delay prompted cynical
reflections on Pakistan’s democratic record in the years since
Independence:
In September [1951] it was announced that Corporation elections would be held
early [in 1952]. [But] even at fag end of the year no one is certain when the
promised elections will come. What is true of corporations of Lahore and Karachi
is also true of a number of smaller municipalities and local boards. If provincial
elections could be held in midst of other preoccupations, we do not see any
reason why these elections should be postponed from year to year. It is idle to talk
about the democratic role of local bodies when many of them do not even exist
and many others are taken over by the Governments concerned.129
Nor did the larger-scale and better-known provincial elections that
were held in Pakistan during the early 1950s prove, in practice, particu-
larly effective attempts at state-building. As well as exposing the inability
of local administrations to ensure that they were conducted fairly, they
revealed frailties in the position of the ruling Muslim League, even
though, unlike opposition political groups, the party was helped by its
close relationship with the apparatus of the state. This advantage was
clearly seen in West Punjab, wherein the run-up to Pakistan’s first
provincial election – held there in March 1951 – long-standing internal
political rivalries divided the local Muslim League into two opposing
camps. Supporters of Mian Mumtaz Daultana now lined up against
those of the Khan of Mamdot, who had formed his breakaway ‘Jinnah
Awami Muslim League’ as a direct challenge to League authority; and
‘the party, the assembly and the administration were all split down the
middle’.130 Thanks to ‘the shortage of housing, the high cost of rents as
well as utilities and food, unemployment and undisguised favouritism in
the allotment of property’ that accounted for ‘widespread opposition to
anyone or anything associated with the central government’, contempor-
ary observers expected the League ‘to be mauled in key urban
centres’.131
With the votes counted, the League emerged victorious, though the
low turnout of c. 30 per cent together with the party’s unexpectedly clear

128
US Embassy Despatch 982, 2 May 1953, 790D.00/5-253 USNA.
129 130
Dawn, 1 November 1952. Jalal, The State of Martial Rule, p. 80.
131
Ibid., p. 147.
 ‘New Citizens’ 173

margin of victory prompted widespread complaints that the elections had

been ‘a farce, a mockery and a fraud upon the electorates’. Critics
claimed that more than fifty contestants had won seats precisely thanks
to their relationship with public servants, and, in many eyes, these kinds
of ‘illegal tactics constituted a blot on the fair name of democracy’.132
The subsequent Electoral Reform Commission Report recognized that
‘Government servants by virtue of their position possess considerable
influence’. This meant that they had to be
unequivocally directed to keep themselves altogether aloof from politics: they
must not be allowed to canvass or otherwise interfere or use their influence in
connection with or take part in elections to the legislative bodies, except by way of
freely exercising their right to vote, and in this respect also they must be enjoined
not to give any indication of the manner in which they propose to vote or may
have voted.133
This apparent high moral stance, however, did not prevent the authorities
themselves from playing a last-minute trump card the day before polling
itself started. Bold newspaper headlines on 9 March announced that an
attempted coup – the Rawalpindi Conspiracy – had been foiled. The
alleged plot’s purpose, Liaquat Ali Khan declared, had been ‘to create
commotion in the country by violent means’. Although newspapers
refrained from explicitly calling on voters to support the ruling party at
the polls, the implication of this apparent coincidence was clear: the nation
having been placed in danger, Pakistanis (in this case Punjabis) needed to
back the party that had averted the crisis, namely the Muslim League.134
Elections for the Sindh Legislative Assembly that were held in May
1953 surprised some contemporaries by the extent to which they
appeared to be more ‘fair and impartial’ than many had expected. All
the same, district local board polls, which had been scheduled for the end
of March that year, were once more postponed on the grounds that ‘two
elections at about the same time’ would overstrain the administration.135
In the end, the Sindh provincial elections were themselves held also over
a year late thanks to the imposition of governor’s rule in December 1951,
which had resulted in the postponement of elections scheduled for
March 1952.136 Election Commissioner Syed Hashim Raza (by now

132
Electoral Reform Commission Report, 1956, p. 1, cited in Tahir Kamran, ‘Early Phase of
Electoral Politics in Pakistan: 1950s’, A Research Journal of South Asian Studies 24, 2
(July–December 2009), p. 265.
133
Cited in Ahmad, Government and Politics in Pakistan, p. 158.
134
Dawn, 9 March 1951.
135
UKHC, Karachi, Review of Events in Sind, Karachi and Baluchistan, No. 5, 24
February–9 March 1953, DO35/5300 UKNA.
136
US Embassy Despatch 805, 4 January 1952, 790D.00/1-452 USNA.
174 New Constitutions, New Citizens

Secretary of the Sindh Department of Education, Health and Local Self-

Government) took personal responsibility for ensuring that the adminis-
tration would perform its duty, in his words, ‘honestly and impartially’. He
toured the province to ‘set the election machinery in gear’, and instructed
district officials ‘in their duties during the polling’.137 The following
measures were put in place. First to help illiterate voters, each of the
contending parties would receive ‘election colours’ to be used on ballot
boxes. Indelible ink for obtaining thumb impressions which would last for
at least twenty-four hours following voting would be used. Second, Gazet-
ted officers, as far as possible, were to act as presiding officers at the
elections, on the grounds that ‘they would be less amenable to influence’.
Ballot boxes would be sealed and only opened for counting in the presence
of candidates or their election agents. And finally, government officials
were to be instructed to remain strictly aloof from factionalism during the
elections. In all, it was later calculated that these elections cost an esti-
mated one million Pakistani rupees (in addition to the 900,000 rupees
spent on preparing voters’ lists), though of the 1,709,355 registered voters
in the province, fewer than one-sixth (240,519) were women.138
But Sindh’s close proximity to the federal capital Karachi meant that it
was not only provincial politicians who entered the campaign fray there.
Prime Minister Mohammad Ali Bogra, for instance, visited Upper Sindh
in the week before the polls opened, addressing voters in Jacobabad,
Sukkur, and other smaller towns and villages, while other members of
his Cabinet as well as ex-ministers toured the province in support of the
Muslim League cause.139 The wider significance of local electoral polit-
ics had been underlined by recent developments in Sukkur in Upper
Sindh, where the election of the former Speaker of the Sindh Legislative
Assembly, Agha Bahruddin, to the presidency of its District Board the
previous October in the face of opposition from supporters of former
Sindh Chief Minister Khuhro (then awaiting the verdict of a PRODA
corruption tribunal) had drawn attention to the extent to which local
rivalries had become entangled with League politics.140

137
UKHC, Karachi, Review of events in Sind, Karachi and Baluchistan, No. 5, 24
February–9 March 1953, DO35/5300 UKNA; UKHC, Karachi, Review of Events in
Sind, Karachi and Baluchistan, No. 8, 7–20 April 1953, DO35/5300 UKNA.
138
US Embassy Despatch 884, 26 March 1953, 790d.00/3-2653 USNA.
139
UKHC, Karachi, Review of Events in Sind, Karachi and Baluchistan, No. 9, 21 April–4
May 1953, DO35/5300 UKNA.
140
Dawn, 27 October 1952. To illustrate how tangled Sindhi politics was during the 1950s,
a couple of years later, in July 1955, with his PRODA disqualification by then quashed
and already re-appointed Chief Minister of Sindh, Khuhro was re-elected unopposed to
the Sindh Legislative Assembly (SLA) in a by-election in Tando Adam-Shahdadpur
constituency. According to an admittedly not very sympathetic press, four other
 ‘New Citizens’ 175

The key provincial election in terms of wider, all-Pakistan, political

impact, however, was that of East Bengal in March 1954, whose results
rippled, or perhaps more accurately ripped, across the country as a
whole. This poll involved some twenty million voters, of whom around
85 per cent were illiterate and 50 per cent women, with the vast majority
never having participated in any election before. Despite the rhetoric of
the ruling provincial Muslim League ministry, which emphasized its
expected victory, ‘the ordinary man is made aware at every point of an
administration and a political party which seem to him to be full of
individuals who are personally corrupt and feathering their own nests at
his expense’.141 In the words of one foreign observer,
the Muslim League are sparing no effort on the organizational side to win this
election. Controlling as they do the electoral machinery, the administration, the
police and ample funds they stand a good chance of pulling it off – by hook or by
crook … the fact is that the election is not ‘free and fair’ and the League
commands infinitely greater resources of inducement, force and fraud than the
United Front.142
These provincial elections exposed similar problems from a wider
administrative perspective. In late January 1954, the date for polling
originally set as 16 February was changed to 8 March. Prime Minister
Mohammad Ali Bogra, arriving back in Karachi from a pre-election trip
to East Pakistan, gave as the first reason for the postponement that the
administrative arrangements were not complete on the grounds that the
previous arrangements had not given ‘sufficient time to the candidates
and the electorate to do justice to the task’143: in his words, ‘there was no
use going to the polls to find that there were no ballot boxes’.144 But he
added that all contesting parties supported a later poll, primarily so as to
give themselves more time to coordinate their campaigning. Civil ser-
vants, on the other hand, were hesitant about the need for delay:

candidates (including former SLA Speaker Mir Ghulam Ali Khan Talpur) had tried to
stand but had been prevented from doing so by administrative action that had allegedly
hustled them into official transport and then ‘dumped them in the middle of the Sind
desert’. UKHC, Karachi, Review of Events in Sind, Karachi and Baluchistan, No. 15,
15–28 July 1955, DO35/3501 UKNA.
141
Deputy High Commission, Dacca, ‘Report on East Pakistan Elections’, (n.d. March
1954), DO35/5196 UKNA.
142
Ibid.
143
Pakistan Fortnightly Summary Pt II, No. 19, 3 February 1954, DO35/5196 UKNA;
Deputy High Commission, Dacca, Fortnightly Report No. 3 for period ending
5 February 1954, DO 35/5298 UKNA.
144
UKHC, Karachi, to Commonwealth Relations Office, 1 February 1954, DO35/
5196 UKNA.
176 New Constitutions, New Citizens

The only people who have been opposed to the idea of postponements were
senior members of the administration in Dacca and the districts; this is for two
reasons. First, their plans and organization are geared to the original date … and
so it is no easy thing in a country where communications are so difficult and
administrative expertise so lacking to make the necessary last minute adjustment
in these plans. Secondly, there has been a certain amount of concern about the
violence and disorders at some of the election meetings up and down the
province and the administration were worried about the possibility of this
developing into something more serious if the campaign is prolonged. Since,
however, the parties are for once unanimous the administration could cut very
little ice.145

As the campaign progressed, foreign observers were convinced that the

election was not going to be ‘free and fair’, as the Muslim League
commanded ‘infinitely greater resources of inducement, force and fraud
than the United Front’. In the closing stages of the campaign, the League
brought into play what it calculated to be two powerful weapons. The
first of these was the East Bengal Electoral Offences Ordinances
deployed on 20 February to lock up around 500 opposition party
workers. The second was Fatima Jinnah, who carried out an eight-day
tour of the province, using the ‘immense authority of her name to ram
home the Muslim League thesis that the continued stability, prosperity
and even existence of Pakistan’ required a League victory. According to a
British report, ‘Much [was] being made of the fact that this [was] the first
time that Miss Jinnah [had] taken part in a provincial election in Pakistan
and that accordingly she must be deeply convinced of the danger to the
nation of a Muslim League defeat’.146
Following the United Front victory, the incoming provincial Chief
Minister Fazlul Haq took pains to make it clear that he was satisfied with
the service that bureaucrats were rendering his Ministry in East Pakistan.
According to foreign observers, government servants there gave no sign
of anxiety or insecurity.147 All the same, the response back in Karachi
was that the Constituent Assembly should proceed ‘without interruption’
from early April onwards with the task of framing the constitution, so that
direct elections could be held within the following year.148 By the end of
May, however, the central Government citing serious local disturbances
(according to some foreign observers, defeated Muslim Leaguers ‘bent

145
Deputy UK High Commission, Dacca, to UK High Commission, Karachi, 30 January
1954, DO35/5196 UKNA.
146
Deputy UK High Commission, Dacca, Fortnightly Report 5 for period ending 5 March
1954, DO35/5298 UKNA.
147
UKHC Karachi to Commonwealth Relations Office, 14 April 1954, DO35/
5323 UKNA.
148
Extract from DRUM 612, 6 April 1954, DO35/5196 UKNA.
 ‘New Citizens’ 177

on discrediting Mr Fazlul Huq’s Government’ may have been at work

behind the scenes) had suspended the recently elected provincial minis-
try under Section 92A of the 1935 Government of India Act, ‘for the
minimum time necessary to restore law and order and public confidence
in the Province’.149 What must have helped to prompt this action were
Huq’s recent statements in Calcutta as regards ‘the essential oneness of
“India” and the common heritage of the two Bengals’.150
In the longer run, and once the 1956 Constitution had been promul-
gated, a key factor that prompted the army coup in October 1958 was the
prospect of a general election outcome that might bring an East
Pakistani-dominated government to power, upsetting the existing bal-
ance of power that had been firmly tilted in West Pakistan’s favour since
Independence.151 In this context, the municipal elections that took
place in Karachi in April 1958 were expected to be an important litmus
test of public opinion, though in the event their results confirmed
the faction-ridden nature of the city’s politics and frustrations with
mainstream politicians.152 Back in December 1957, that is prior to the
military takeover, Karachi’s Chief Commissioner N. M. Khan had
announced the dissolution of the city’s elected council, on charges of
‘mal-administration, mismanagement, nepotism and corruption’.153
A district magistrate was duly appointed caretaker ‘Municipal Commis-
sioner’, and the date for the elections set for after May 1958. These latest
Karachi elections once again exposed the practical challenges involved in
registering voters. On this occasion, the names of only about a quarter
(c. 450,000) of the city’s population were included in the rolls that were
drawn up by the end of February. Pakistani nationality was still not
a requirement of voter eligibility. Instead, the criteria were adulthood,

149
India Fortnightly Summary Pt II, 25 May 1954, DO35/5323 UKNA.
150
Peshawar Report 10, 21 May 1954, DO35/4323 UKNA.
151
Jalal, The State of Martial Rule.
152
These municipal elections highlighted the support among refugees for the religio-
political organization, the Jamaat-i-Islami, which had shifted much of its activities to
the city from the Punjab, following the anti-Ahmadi riots there earlier in the 1950s. For
more details, see Ansari, Life after Partition, pp. 175–81. For a broader discussion of the
Jamaat’s activities during the 1950s, see Ali Usman Qasmi, Ahmadis and the Politics of
Religious Exclusion in Pakistan (London: Anthem Press, 2014), and on the organization
over the longer-term see S. V. R. Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: the
Jamaat-i Islami of Pakistan (London: I.B. Tauris, 1994).
153
‘Text of Press Note issued by the Chief Commissioner of Karachi dissolving the
Karachi Municipal Corporation’, 15 January 1957, 790d.00/1-1557 USNA. These
comments echoed those of an earlier Chief Commissioner who had dissolved the
KMA in early 1954 on similar grounds of ‘selfishness, corruption, absence of
decorum and lack of civic pride’. See UKHC, Karachi, Review of Events in Sind,
Karachi and Baluchistan, 30 December 1954–12 January 1955, DO35/3501 UKNA.
178 New Constitutions, New Citizens

a minimum of one year’s residence in the city and appearing on the

electoral roll itself. This meant that people still living on footpaths were
restricted from voting as they had no officially recognized fixed abode.154
As sections of the press later commented, while the government’s action
to dissolve the KMC had been ‘to the relief of two million exploited,
harassed and despoiled citizens of Karachi’, ‘in the present democratic
age [the] death of any democratic organization at the hands of Govern-
ment cannot be considered proper’, and it queried what ‘method of
action’ over the longer run would be taken ‘to reform the irregularities
and make the Corporation a democratic organization’.155

Conclusion
Across South Asia, in the decade following Independence and Partition,
citizenship remained a work in progress. In this context, voting – and
equally not voting – came to represent the degree of assumed ‘progress’
that each country was making as far as turning people who had formerly
being subjects under colonial rule into bona fide citizens was concerned.
In India, as developments in UP and elsewhere demonstrated, the out-
come of early democratic elections proved to be more successful than
many observers had anticipated. In Pakistan, in Sindh as in other prov-
inces, the deceptively simple act of casting a vote was less straightforward
and arguably a far more frustrating process, but those elections that did
take place there were well-supported at the popular local level at least.
Either way, just as the everyday experiences of citizenship, movement
and urban living were coming to define the structures of belonging, so
too were similar processes taking place within the sphere of electoral
politics. During the early post-Independence period, South Asia’s popu-
lations were finding their own ways of adjusting to the exercise of newly
won, if not necessarily exercised, citizens’ rights. Indeed, reactions and
responses on the part of ordinary Indians and Pakistanis illustrate two
key trends taking place in the years immediately following the ending of
British rule.
First, external observers, leading members of the main political parties,
and ordinary citizens in both India and Pakistan tended to share similar
assumptions that successful democracy was an inescapable dynamic of
‘modernity’, defined by the metrics of socio-economic development.

154
See US Embassy Despatch 678, 7 February 1958, 790D.00/2-758 USNA.
155
Comment (Karachi), 16 December 1957; Anjam (Karachi), 16 December 1957; Nai
Roshni (Karachi), 16 December 1957, cited in UK High Commission Opdom 56, 8–15
July 1958, L/WS/1/1599 IOR BL.
 Conclusion 179

South Asia’s new states had, according to this contemporary analysis,

only recently reached a level of preparedness for universal suffrage. It
remained to be seen from the vantage point of the 1940s and 1950s
whether low levels of literacy, poor transport and communications infra-
structure, and the persistence of traditional social structures (such as
caste in India) would undermine elections. That this set of assumptions
was proved conclusively wrong by the effective exercise of the vote in
India in 1951–2 indicates something important about the gulf between
contemporary modernist ideas of state and the realities of its substruc-
ture. As Shani has explored, thanks to the numerous ongoing inter-
actions between people and administrators over the preparation of
electoral rolls, these years witnessed the rewriting of bureaucratic imagin-
ations with respect to the franchise and voting rights, and helping the
universal franchise to become a meaningful political order in which
Indians would believe and to which they would become committed.156
Even when elections failed to materialize in Pakistan, or those that were
held did not keep to the original timetable, they were still keenly antici-
pated and the subject of much, often heated, discussion.
However, as this chapter has also shown, widely held public pessimism
about corruption and government mismanagement, together with the
continuing chaos of post-Partition urban life, did not necessarily or
automatically result in cynicism about politics overall. Quite the oppos-
ite. So the second trend apparent by the early 1950s was that participa-
tion in and discussion about elections seemed to be enhanced by
everyday controversies centred on governance. Elections observers
across India in those same 1951–2 polls, for instance, pointed out that
in some places, UP among them, incumbent regimes were particularly
challenged around issues such as food supply, corruption, budget irregu-
larities, black markets, and misallocation of permits and licenses. It was
in these places, too, where turnout was often the highest. Moreover, this
observation is strengthened by the fact that in across the region – as
exemplified by developments in Sindh and UP – heightened electoral
engagement was often linked to problems of real or presumed
maladministration.
This pattern of engagement would tend to adjust traditional argu-
ments in the political science literature, which concentrate on the role
of electoral cliques as part of a ‘Congress system’ in India during the
years under scrutiny. Undoubtedly, factional arrangements had become

156
Ornit Shani, ‘How India Became Democratic – Part IV’, www.firstpost.com/india/how-
india-became-democratic-part-iv-ornit-shani-responds-to-experts-comments-on-her-
book-4402445.html (accessed December 2018).
180 New Constitutions, New Citizens

more fully formed by the time of India’s second general election of 1957,
and election complaints files relating to UP show that these had become
a key dynamic of Congress’ candidate selection to constituencies. But, all
the same, the first Indian general elections demonstrated that the prom-
ises of early postcolonial regimes formed the background to common
reactions to the electoral process. And these, in turn, were directly linked
to the recent experiences of migration, movement and displacement
caused by Partition. What Atul Kohli has described as the ‘crisis of
governability’ in the 1990s, with the rise of caste-based political
parties,157 accordingly had its preconditions in the early 1950s, and there
was no sense in which this weakened the electoral process itself. Mean-
while in Pakistan, the encounter was different. There political messages
delivered by voting results at the provincial level – in particular signalled
by the 1954 polls in East Pakistan but echoed to varying degrees else-
where – sounded a warning bell for the central authorities regarding
popular political expectations, and so played their part in delaying the
long-anticipated all-Pakistan elections after 1956. Even a municipal elec-
tion, such as the one held in Karachi in 1958, only served to reinforce the
reluctance of those controlling the Pakistani state to permit its citizens to
exercise their voting rights at the highest level. Indeed, as this chapter has
discussed more broadly, talk about constitutions combined with the
conduct of South Asia’s elections in the decade following Independence
when viewed from a comparative cross-border perspective sheds valuable
light on how quickly popular engagement in politics in both India and
Pakistan came to be shaped by civic circumstances, often in relation to
debates centred on access to public goods alongside the exercising of
what people perceived to be citizens’ rights.

157
Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India’s Growing Crisis of Governability
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
5 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in
Postcolonial South Asia

In 1940, in a Central Legislative Assembly debate regarding women’s

continuing legal disabilities, the UP activist Hajrah Begum asked when
‘men of India [would] realize that it is of no use asking a third party to
play fair when they themselves are willing to close their eyes to all the
wrongs the women suffer and have mental reservations when freedom is
proposed for womanhood?’ According to her, ‘Indians would not gain
Swaraj until they had set their own house in order and granted women
legal equality’.1
With Independence, all adult women in India and Pakistan, like all
adult men, gained equality in the form of the right to vote; universal
suffrage was to be part and parcel of the new political arrangements, and
central to what citizenship in both countries would now confer. The
Indian National Congress and the Muslim League in preceding decades
had deliberately made space for female participation in their activities,
harnessing the words and deeds of women as a way of signalling the
inclusivity of the ‘nations’ that they claimed to represent. Political inclu-
sion, however, was something that women themselves had been striving
to obtain from the turn of the twentieth century, and so, long before
Independence was actually achieved, how and where women fitted into
wider understandings about citizenship and belonging were the subject
of debate and disagreement. After August 1947, women, whose involve-
ment had been accepted as essential during the freedom struggle, needed
to be included in what constituted the new ‘nation’. But what role was
deemed appropriate for women and what their rights in practice as
citizens encompassed were questions that proved problematic for both
countries in the years that followed.

1
Quoted in Geraldine Forbes, ‘The Indian Women’s Movement: A Struggle for Women’s
Rights or National Liberation?’, in The Extended Family: Women’s Political Participation in
South Asia, ed. Gail Minault (Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1981), p. 63. For a more
detailed exploration of specific developments in UP, see Visalakshi Menon, Indian Women
and Nationalism: The UP Story (New Delhi: Shakti Books, 2003).

181
182 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in Postcolonial South Asia

In independent India, part of the resistance that women’s groups and

their representatives mounted to their enduring second-class status,
derived from the legacy of the colonial landscape in which women’s
rights had been ascribed an almost ‘ethnicized’ element of group rights.
In Pakistan – not surprisingly in view of its religious raison d’être –
competing rhetoric with respect to women’s rights often hinged on
different interpretations of Islam. As this chapter will explore, in both
UP and Sindh – as in India and Pakistan more widely – the status of
women as citizens was keenly contested, and women’s movements on
both sides of the border in the first decade following Independence were
caught up in the search for ways of balancing universal notions of
citizenship alongside female mobilization. Women’s organizations in
the late 1940s and early 1950s engaged with the idea of group rights,
in the main, by juggling liberal universal notions of citizenship on
the one hand and movements for grassroots feminist mobilization on
the other. Likewise, this was also a question of scales of mobilization: the
often-difficult relationship between local movements and regional,
national or international ones was also part and parcel of the challenges
faced by women more generally, not least around problems of
representation.

Colonial Developments
For India and Pakistan alike, developments in the late 1940s and early
1950s need to be placed in the context of longer term developments in
women’s rights dating from the late colonial period, and in particular
from the interwar years. Gender inequality had deep roots in colonial
South Asia, with women frequently denied the same legal rights as men
in matters of inheritance, property ownership and the guardianship of
children. To improve the status of women, social reformers from the
nineteenth century had campaigned for women’s education and widow
remarriage, as well as to end social practices such as sati and child
marriage. In all of these efforts, as Geraldine Forbes has explained,
education was regarded as essential in order to produce ‘a “new [Indian]
woman” with interests that went beyond the household’.2 In the first
instance, men belonging to religious reform movements often took the
lead and carried out invaluable work in terms of extending the educa-
tional horizons of at least some women. But these initiatives also imposed
limitations since the thinking behind them tended to envisage the home

2
Geraldine Forbes, Women in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), p. 64.
 Colonial Developments 183

as the primary area of female activity. Thus, again as Forbes has noted,
such social reform effort ‘was often tentative, facile, or nugatory’, and
tended not to challenge patriarchal norms.3
Gradually, however, improving access to female education gained
increasing support among women themselves. Bodies representing
Muslim interests, such as the Anjuman-i Khawateen-i Islam that was
founded in Lahore in 1908, reflected this shifting outlook. The main
focus of the All-India Muslim Ladies’ Conference set up in 1915 was
likewise the challenge of expanding women’s education. Both organiza-
tions also advocated a measure of social reform, targeting purdah and
polygamy for particular criticism. During the First World War, Indian
women from across communities came to be more involved in political
activity. In 1917, the Women’s Indian Association (WIA) – whose
founders included a number of European women, such as Annie Besant,
Margaret Cousins and Dorothy Graham Jinarajadass, alongside Indians
such as Raj Kumari Amrit Kaur who became Gandhi’s secretary in
1919 and later helped set up the All-India Women’s Conference (AIWC)
for which she acted as secretary for many years – accentuated the need to
educate women, organized local classes and discussion groups, and
campaigned against child marriage and for female inheritance and voting
rights. In this context, Gail Minault’s pioneering work on Muslim
women’s lives has shown how between 1911 and 1924 – a period that
witnessed growing Muslim political self-assertion – Muslim women
started to become more directly involved in political action. Taking
the example of Bi Amman (mother of the Ali Brothers who headed
the Khilafat movement that linked up with Gandhi’s non-cooperation
drive launched in 1919) and other women involved in the Muslim
Ladies’ Conference, Minault’s writings, along with those of Siobhan
Lambert-Hurley, have underscored the importance of ‘purdah politics’
in generating support for a self-conscious Muslim political constituency
during these protest years.4
The emergence of new women’s organizations after the First World
War further enlarged the arena within which female activism could take
place. Lobbying in favour of the Child Marriage Restraint Act that was

3
Ibid., pp. 27–8.
4
Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in
India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Gail Minault, ‘Sisterhood or
Separatism: The All-India Muslim Ladies’ Conference and the Nationalist Movement’,
in The Extended Family: Women and Political Participation in India and Pakistan, ed. Gail
Minault (Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1981), pp. 83–108; Siobhan Lambert-Hurley,
‘Fostering Sisterhood: Muslim Women and the All-India Ladies’ Association’, Journal of
Women’s History 16, 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 40–65.
184 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in Postcolonial South Asia

passed in 1929 drew women from different religious communities

together in forums such as the National Council of Women in India
and the AIWC that had been established in 1925 and 1927, respectively.
According to Forbes, this Act proved to be a consensus issue that
provided national organizations with the opportunity to coordinate
women belonging to different regions and communities. Moreover,
when, in the late 1920s, elements within India’s Muslim communities
tried to get this legislation amended in order to exclude Muslim women
from its provisions, Muslim AIWC members argued in its favour and
refused to allow men to speak on their behalf.5
Scathing Western critiques of Indian social and cultural practices
involving women, epitomized by Katherine Mayo’s controversial Mother
India that was published in 1927, helped to increase the space for liberal
feminism within the broader nationalist movement.6 Before then, the
prevailing gender ideology in Indian nationalist circles was that women
‘naturally’ embodied the spiritual sphere of the nation, itself deemed
superior to the West. This correlation produced a scenario, in which,
as Mrinalini Sinha has argued, ‘The burden of representing the inner and
authentic realm of the nation in nationalist discourse’ fell on the figure of
the ‘modern Indian woman’.7 But the storm of protest over polemical
writings such as Mother India generated greater legitimacy for middle-
class women’s involvement in overt political activity and more support
from nationalist men for female emancipation, something that has led
Sinha to conclude that in interwar India ‘The discursive figure of the
modern Indian woman, once the signifier of national cultural difference,
was now rearticulated in the discourse of liberal feminism as the model
for the citizen of a new nation-state’.8 This ‘nationalist resolution of the
women question’ allowed women to move beyond the confines of their
homes ‘without defying their traditional roles as wives and mothers and

5
Geraldine H. Forbes, ‘Women and Modernity: The Issue of Child Marriage in India’,
Women’s Studies International Forum 2, 4 (1979), pp. 407–19.
6
For an exploration of the massive international controversy that followed the
1927 publication of Mother India, which explains how it became a catalyst for far-
reaching changes, including a reconfiguration of the relationship between the political
and social spheres in colonial India and the coalescence of a collective identity for women,
see Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
7
Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Refashioning Mother India: Feminism and Nationalism in Late-
Colonial India’, Feminist Studies 26, 3, Points of Departure: India and the South Asian
Diaspora (Autumn, 2000), pp. 624–5.
8
Ibid., p. 626.
 Colonial Developments 185

devote themselves to the service of the nation’.9 Involvement with

national movements permitted Indian women to be more demanding
of their political rights, shifting their role from a relatively passive to a
more active one, even if nationalist constructions of ‘new women’ argu-
ably resulted in new forms of subordination.10
As early as 1921, following the Montagu-Chelmsford constitutional
reforms of 1919, provincial legislatures gave women voting rights based
on property qualifications, beginning with Madras in South India.
A decade later, in the wake of Gandhi’s salt satyagraha of 1930 – that
saw 17,000 women imprisoned for their involvement in the protest – the
Congress promised to introduce universal adult franchise when it came
to power. Then, following the 1932 Pune Pact between Gandhi and
the leader of India’s so-called Untouchables, B. R. Ambedkar, the
main Indian parties succumbed to the principle of communal electorates
and reserved seats, though representatives of the AIWC and WIA, led
by Amrit Kaur, rejected the extension of this politics of separate repre-
sentation to include women.11 In a letter to Eleanor Rathbone, British
independent MP and long-term campaigner for women’s rights,12
Muthulakshmi Reddi (the first woman legislator in India who was
appointed to the Madras Legislative Council in 1927) famously
argued that
The only way to bring the Brahmans, the women and the pariahs together on a
common platform is by enfranchising the women and the depressed classes on
equal terms with others. If the women and the depressed classes are given

9
Rochona Majumdar, ‘“Self-Sacrifice” versus “Self-Interest”: A Non-Historicist Reading
of the History of Women’s Rights in India’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and
the Middle East 22, 1&2 (2002), p. 22, in which Majumdar draws on Partha Chatterjee’s
essay, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’, in Recasting Women:
Essays in Indian Colonial History, eds. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999), pp. 233–54.
10
Srimati Basu, She Came to Take Her Rights: Indian Women, Property and Propriety (New
York: State University of New York Press, 1999); Suruchi Thapar-Björkert, ‘The
Domestic Sphere as a Political Site: A Study of Women in the Indian Nationalist
Movement’, Women’s Studies International Forum 20, 4 (1997), pp. 493–504; Leela
Kasturi and Vina Majumdar, Women and Indian Nationalism (Delhi: Vikas Publication
House, 1994).
11
For an overview of the processes involved in extending the franchise to Indian women,
see Mary E. John, ‘Alternate Modernities? Reservations and Women’s Movement in
Twentieth Century India’, Economic and Political Weekly 35, 43/44 (21 October–3
November 2000), pp. 3822–9.
12
For more on Rathbone’s life and work, see Susan Pederson, Eleanor Rathbone and the
Politics of Conscience (London: Yale University Press, 2004).
186 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in Postcolonial South Asia

freedom, power and responsibility, I am sure that they would very soon learn how
to rectify the present social evil.13
Despite most women’s leaders opposing the principle of separate
electorates, the Government of India Act of 1935 introduced separate
seats for women.14 The legislation provided for the formal induction of
women into the political process through an extended franchise allowing
some six million women to vote for both reserved and general seats in
the Council of State, the Central Legislative Assembly and the eleven
provincial assemblies. Six seats were reserved for women out of a total of
156 Council of State seats, to be elected by male and female members of
the provincial assemblies.15 Similarly, 9 out of 250 seats in the Central
Legislative Assembly were reserved for women, who were to be chosen
by the female members of provincial legislatures. Seats were also reserved
for women in the provincial legislatures, though these equated to less
than 4 per cent of the total number.16 In the 1937 provincial elections
that followed soon after, 4.25 million women registered to vote, and
some 917,000 actually participated.17 In terms of outcomes, in the
provinces out of 1,500 seats, 56 women were elected (41 to reserved
seats, 10 to general seats and 5 were nominated). In addition, thirty
women joined the Central Assembly.18
Alongside the political developments of this period, the distinctively
British colonial proposal for communal representation, whether in terms
of the franchise or more broadly, tended to mobilize women’s groups in
pursuit of more cosmopolitan definitions of rights before Independence
had taken place. This can be seen in discussions in UP in the mid- to late

13
Quoted in Gail Pearson, ‘Reserved Seats: Women and the Vote in Bombay’, in Women in
Colonial India: Essays on Survival, Work and the State, ed. J. Krishnamurty (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1989), p. 205.
14
Aparna Basu, ‘Women’s Struggle for the Vote: 1917–1937’, Indian Historical Review 35, 1
(January 2008), pp. 128–43; Barbara Southard, ‘Colonial Politics and Women’s Rights:
Woman Suffrage Campaigns in Bengal, British India in the 1920s’, Modern Asian Studies
27, 2 (March 1993), pp. 397–439; Azra Asghar Ali, ‘Indian Muslim Women’s Suffrage
Campaign: Personal Dilemma and Communal Identity 1919–1947’, Journal of the
Pakistan Historical Society 47, 2 (April 1999), pp. 33–46; Rosalind Parr, ‘Citizens of
Everywhere: Indian Nationalist Women and the Global Public Sphere, 1900–1952’
(unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2018), pp. 82–108.
15
These six seats were allocated to the provinces of Madras, Bengal, Bombay, Uttar
Pradesh, Punjab and Bihar.
16
Jana Matson Everett, Women and Social Change in India (New Delhi: Heritage, 1979);
Laura Dudley Jenkins, ‘Competing Inequalities: The Struggle Over Reserved Seats for
Women in India’, International Review of Social History 44 (1999), pp. 53–75.
17
The electorate as a whole amounted to some thirty million or 12 per cent of India’s adult
population at the time.
18
Jahanara Shahnawaz, Father and Daughter: A Political Autobiography (Lahore: Nigarishat,
1971), p. 152.
 Colonial Developments 187

1930s that centred on possible reservations for women in government

service. In 1935, the Reforms Department requested a list of services and
posts that might be reserved ‘for a particular sex’ [women] in line with
Section 275 of the new Government of India Act, which stated that
‘A person shall not be disqualified by sex for being appointed to any civil
service of, or civil post under, the Crown in India’.19 The main focus of
the ensuing discussion, however, was around how the provincial author-
ities would be able to evade the equality provisions. Far from interpreting
this as a mechanism for improving women’s employment in the services,
the proposal seemed to be more about maintaining existing preserves for
men. It was noted, for example, that the Civil (executive) Services, UP
Police, UP Civil (judicial), tahsildars and naib tahsildars should continue
to be ‘reserved exclusively for men’, since these posts called for ‘consid-
erable powers of physical endurance. Though officers in the Judicial
Department [were] not called upon to perform duties in riots, in raids
on gambling dens, in chasing dacoits, etc., their service require[d] con-
tinuity of work, which in the case of women [was] likely to be interrupted
by marriage etc.’.20 In 1936, this qualification turned into specific gov-
ernment orders regarding those posts that were ordinarily to be ‘reserved’
for men, and others that might be recommended to be set aside for
women. The former included appointments to higher positions in the
Medical, Public Health, Forest, Revenue, Finance, Judicial and Public
Works departments, while among the latter were named principal and
lecturers at the Women’s Medical School in Agra; superintendents of
medical aid to women, matrons and female warders in jails; inspectresses
in the Cooperative Department; chief inspectresses of Girls’ Schools,
circle inspectress of Girls’ Schools, PA to the chief inspector of Girls’
Schools, lady principals of Girls’ Schools, head mistresses of Govern-
ment schools, and matrons in the Educational Department.21
The real problem facing the authorities, however, was that under the
recent legislation, existing civil services rules were set to become ultra
vires from 1936 onwards, and so to overcome this constraint the UP
government suggested that a general order could stipulate that women
were ‘not eligible for services requiring great physical endurance, control

19
Government of India Act 1935, Article 275, p. 173.
20
‘Notes and Orders: Reservation of Services and Posts for a Particular Sex under Section
275 of the Government of India Act, 1935’, Appointments Dept, Box 212, File 724/
1935 UPSA.
21
‘Note for Government Meeting Regarding Section 275 of the Government of India Act,
1935’, C. W. Gwynne, 14/6/1936, Appointments Dept, Box 212, File 724/1935 UPSA;
‘Reservation of Services and Posts for a Particular Sex under Section 275 of the
Government of India Act 1935’ UPSA.
188 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in Postcolonial South Asia

of men, extensive touring, or involving danger’.22 Harry Haig, UP gov-

ernor in 1938, put forward an argument that would later be used to
oppose legal reform that addressed women’s rights in family property,
marriage and divorce. In his view, Indian society was still far too conser-
vative to countenance the increase of women’s roles in public service:
The feminist movement has made such rapid progress in recent years that we may
not be able to say so positively for much longer that women are not as capable as
men in powers of endurance and in the performance of work which involves the
control of large bodies of men. On the other hand public opinion in India is
generally conservative and will probably for many years resent the intrusion of
women in the various branches of public service. Apart from public opinion and
the difficulty that must arise when women marry and have families would present
in Government service a problem almost insoluble.23

The UP-approved list of recommended reservations for men in the late

1930s was extensive: all the top executive posts, including secretary to
the governor, advocate general, Public Service Commission and secre-
tary to the Upper House had to be filled by males, while the office
establishment and staff attached to those posts could be taken up by
women.24 Haig went on to comment that ‘opinion in India itself is
opposed to sex equality in service and indeed to the employment of
women at all in most services. In practice the exclusion of women is
mainly secured by the simple expedient of not appointing them to
services’. He was clearly concerned that if women performed better in
competitive examinations, this would likely make it difficult to exclude
them, but he concluded with a final observation, ‘Section 275 of the
Government of India Act seems to be a piece of interfering stupidity by
the English feminists, and apparently involves us in various ridiculous
processes’.25
The problem of female government employment was taken up in due
course by the UP Congress Ministry. The two years (1937–9) of Con-
gress rule in eight of India’s eleven provinces was in many respects a
phase of political and administrative reform, and prefigured much of
what happened during the early postcolonial period. Possibly it did so,
although in a largely negative sense, in the area of women’s rights,
establishing a pattern of largely symbolic recognition of gender equality
as a means of maintaining certain inequalities. G. B. Pant, for one,
pointed out in discussions on the issue that no specific order actually
needed to be put in place, since change would happen naturally at the

22
Ibid.
23
Harry Haig, 16 June 1936, Appointments Dept, Box 212, File 724/1935 UPSA.
24 25
Ibid. Ibid.
 Colonial Developments 189

discretion of the Public Services Commission. In a remark that was later

to epitomize how independent governments approached the implemen-
tation of constitutional rights, Pant added, ‘Let us observe the principle
of equality of sex, at least in theory. I know that this province is too
conservative to outgrow age long prejudice at once’ [emphasis added].26
But by the time of the Second World War, earlier cross-community
consensus within the women’s movement had been greatly undermined
by the growth of communal politics, and all-India women’s organizations
were fast losing their ‘universal’ authority. Mobilizing women had
become crucial to the Muslim League, whose leaders wanted to stimulate
the political consciousness of Muslim women as a means of generating
and legitimizing support for their cause. In 1938, for instance, Jinnah
famously supported a resolution moved at the annual Muslim League
session that argued for opportunities to enable women to participate in
the development of the ‘Muslim nation’, and called for more Muslim
women to take a direct part in nationalist activity: after all, ‘no nation
[could] make progress without the co-operation of its women. If Muslim
women support[ed] their men as they did in the days of the Prophet of
Islam, [the League] should soon realise [its] goal’.27 Muslim women now
took part in increasingly numbers in pro-Muslim League demonstrations
in the run up to independence. According to David Willmer, the Muslim
League needed its ‘mothers of the nation’, since women represented ‘an
obvious and distinct constituency which could be readily exploited for
rhetorical purposes and politically mobilized to good effect’.28
Undoubtedly, women who ended up supporting the Muslim League
did so for a range of reasons. Some simply followed the example set by
menfolk in their families. But others responded more independently,
with their resulting activism a reflection of the somewhat greater degree

26
Note of G. B. Pant, Appointments Dept, Box 212, File 724/1935 UPSA.
27
Riswan Ahmad, ‘Sayings of the Quaid-i-Azam’: Mohammed Ali Jinnah (Karachi: Quaid
Foundation and Pakistan Movement Centre, 1993), p. 105, quoted in Akbar S. Ahmed,
Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin (London: Routledge, 1997),
p. 60.
28
David Willmer, ‘Women as Participants in the Pakistan Movement: Modernisation and
the Promise of a Moral State’, Modern Asian Studies 31, 3 (1996), p. 573. According to
Willmer, the extent of female involvement in the Muslim League’s campaign to secure a
separate Muslim state can be explained by the fact that the idea of ‘Pakistan’ contained a
special – ‘surplus’ of – meaning for Muslim women, with that the result that women and
men in the run up to Pakistan’s creation had different ‘gendered’ visions of what its
future held. But, in his view, the general failure on the part of historians to acknowledge
the complexities of female involvement has meant that alternative ‘moral’ meanings have
been submerged by the dominant political narrative of the Pakistan movement, and,
hence, the issue of how far processes of the so-called modernization were woven into the
struggle for some kind of ‘Pakistan’ has tended to be overlooked.
190 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in Postcolonial South Asia

of autonomy that was permitted by the unsettled political circumstances

of the time. Either way, it would be hard to imagine that the latter
interpreted ‘Pakistan’ – whatever this might subsequently mean in prac-
tice – as a place where their rights as females would not be safeguarded.
Jinnah, after all, had taken a prominent part in the campaign to secure
the passage of the Shariat Application Act of 1937, which targeted
existing customary laws that deprived women of their inheritance rights
with respect to immovable property. Besides, he had been an active
supporter of the 1939 Muslim Dissolution of Marriage Act, which had
reinforced awareness of the possibility of challenging existing interpret-
ations of religious law in order to improve the relative position of
women vis-à-vis that of men.29 As illustrated by Dushka Saiyid’s example
of Azra Khanum, the Lahore College for Women student who called
upon Muslim women to educate Muslim men in a speech delivered in
November 1942, women supporters of the League were adamant that
they should participate as equal partners. Political liberation and the
liberation of women, for them, were intimately, and inextricably,
intertwined.30
The picture was equally complicated from the perspective of
mainstream Congress nationalism. In 1934 the AIWC had passed a
resolution demanding a revised Hindu Code that would address the
deficit in female rights by modifying the laws governing marriage and
inheritance.31 But a decade later, in wartime India, when faced with a
choice between supporting or boycotting (as Congress was doing) a
government investigation into women’s ‘legal disabilities’, AIWC
member Vilasini Devi Shenai argued forcefully against automatically
prioritizing the nationalist struggle: as she reminded readers of the
AIWC’s 1944–5 annual report, ‘Today our men are clamouring for
political rights at the hand of an alien government. Have they conceded
their wives, their own sisters, their daughters, “flesh of their flesh, blood

29
For further comment on these two pieces of legislation, see Gail Minault, Secluded
Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1998), pp. 298–306; David Gilmartin, ‘Customary Law and Shari’at in
British Punjab’, in Shari’at and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam, ed. Katherine Ewing
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 43–62; Lucy Carroll, ‘Talaq-i-
Tafwid and Stipulations in a Muslim Marriage Contract: Important Means of
Protecting the Position of the South Asian Muslim Wife’, Modern Asian Studies 16, 2
(1982), pp. 277–8.
30
Dushka Saiyid, Muslim Women of the British Punjab from Seclusion to Politics (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1998), p. 91.
31
Geraldine H. Forbes, ‘Caged Tigers: “First Wave” Feminists in India’, Women’s Studies
International Forum 5, 6 (1982), p. 352.
 Post-1947 India 191

of their blood” social equality and economic justice?’32 Developments

that unfolded in the late colonial period thus produced the context in
which the early post-independence governments of India and Pakistan
responded to the larger issues of women’s legal rights and structures of
employment, particularly in the public sphere. They also helped to shape
the response among women in both states to issues linked with citizen-
ship and the rights and responsibilities that this generated.

Post-1947 India
Turning first to India – which after Independence formulated its new
constitution on the basis of equality for men and women – the provision
of women’s reserved seats was ended. But, to a great extent, the gulf in
India between the symbolism of rights and the realities of how these
were implemented was reflected in detailed and ostensibly far-reaching
legislative enactments relating to women’s rights. As Eleanor Newbigin
has explored in relation to the creation of the modern Hindu legal
subject, the picture on paper at least was a fairly positive one, with a raft
of legislation, backed up by the promotion of an equal position for
women in the Indian Constitution, supported and sometimes initiated
by a powerful group of female politicians in the central and state assem-
blies.33 Up to India’s second general elections, held in 1957, these
initiatives included legislation that affected women’s lives in a range of
ways: the Indian Nursing Council Act, 1947; attempts to pass Prohib-
ition of Dowry Bills, 1951–8; Prevention of Food Adulteration Bills,
1952–60; the Punjab Municipal Act, 1952 (which addressed deficiencies
in public health bills with respect to regulating and licensing institutions
caring for women and children under 18); the Suppression of Immoral
Traffic in Women and Brothels, 1953; the Protection, Maintenance,
Custody, Education and Employment of Children, 1953 (an attempt to
regulate or abolish child labour); Dentists’ Bills, 1953; the Drugs and
Cosmetics Bill, 1954; the Equal Pay for Equal Work, 1956–7 (which
lapsed); and Divorce or Judicial Separation, 1956.34

32
AIWC Report 1944–45, All-India Women’s Conference Library, New Delhi, cited in
ibid., p. 352.
33
Eleanor Newbigin, The Hindu Family and the Emergence of Modern India: Law, Citizenship
and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). For an assessment of
where personal law fitted into this process, see Eleanor Newbigin, ‘Personal Law and
Citizenship in India’s Transition to Independence’, Modern Asian Studies 45, 1 (2011),
pp 7–32.
34
J. K. Chopra, Women in the Indian Parliament (A Critical Study of Their Role) (New Delhi:
Mittal Publications, 1993), pp. 34–5.
192 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in Postcolonial South Asia

As had been recognized in the 1930s, one of the key areas for the
promotion of women’s rights after Independence was professional
employment, since economic autonomy was rightly accepted by a range
of women’s groups as essential when promoting other kinds of rights. In
mid-twentieth-century India, state employment was central to the notion
of professional development, given the role that the state was expected to
take in the larger development of the nation. But what is interesting and
perhaps less frequently acknowledged is the extent to which refugee
displacement played a direct role in widening opportunities for women
within the infrastructure of the new everyday Indian state. This can be
seen in relation to female police officers, even though, as reflected in the
duties of a cadre of female police established in Delhi in 1949, their
responsibilities were restricted to that of other women and children only.
Hence, their duties included interrogating women suspects, accused and
witnesses (particularly purdah-observing women); attending all searches
and investigations in which women were present; looking after the wel-
fare of women in police custody; assisting in the duties connected with
disorderly houses; conducting the investigation of all cases of offences
against women; helping with the control of demonstrations in which
women took part; taking a central role in the recovery of abducted
women; and dealing with juvenile offenders.35
The first female police force to be properly established in independent
India operated in the UP hill station of Dehradun, specifically to help
directly with the influx of refugees. Government officials there had
received reports that displaced refugee families were inducing their
womenfolk to ‘forcibly occupy [the] vacated houses’ of Muslims, which
made it difficult for male police officers to handle this delicate and
complex problem without the aid of female colleagues. Considering the
urgency of this situation, sanction was accorded for the creation of the
temporary posts of one subinspector and two head constables for Deh-
rudun.36 But, for the most part, women’s police forces in these years
were only really tried out at an experimental level, and to deal with very
particular kinds of ‘social ills’ and civic problems – viz. the establishing of
‘a healthy social order’ and in support of older legislation such as the
Naik Girl’s Protection Act 1929; the UP Minor Girls’ Protection Act,
1929; and the UP Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act, 1933.37 By

35
B. N. Srivastava, 19 September 1952, ‘Women Police: Recommendations of the PRC’,
Home Police A, Box 389, File 662/47 UPSA.
36
Ibid.
37
Note of 20 August 1956, ‘Women Police: Recommendations of the PRC’, Home Police
A, Box 389, File 662/47 UPSA.
 Post-1947 India 193

1957 when the fifth ‘All-India Conference of the Association of Moral

and Social Hygiene’ was held, state governments more generally were
requested ‘immediately to constitute Special Police Squads for preventa-
tive and vigilance work and to recommend the appointment of women to
all grades of Police staff in the squads which [would] work in close
cooperation with social workers’.38
There were wider issues surrounding women’s rights and security that
were naturally more clearly articulated in the early post-Partition period
as a result of new public questions about violence against women. Rolled
into this too were debates about public morality. In the meetings of the
Association for Moral and Social Hygiene in 1951, for instance, requests
were made for special ministries for social welfare, ratification of the UN
Convention against the immoral traffic in women and women members
on the Central Board of Film Censors. Conference recommendations
also called for the registration and annual licensing of rescue homes,
widow homes and orphanages; stricter and more stringent enforcement
of the Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act; the establishment of recep-
tion homes for women and children; and special courts set up by state
and central governments to try cases of social vice, held in camera.
A corps of women, they argued, should work especially on social vice
and with trained social workers to deal with rescue and rehabilitation.
The Conference also called for the passage of legislation modelled on the
Undesirable Advertisements Act of West Bengal.39
Many of these efforts were driven by middle-class, urban women
whose vision crossed international borders, but whose experiences were
limited to an English-speaking milieu. They were also dominated by
India’s large cities and their hinterlands, with a disproportionately low
representation from the north when looked at on a national, all-India,
scale. The most important organization representing such women was
the AIWC, founded in 1927 (see Figure 5.1).40 Included among its
office-holders in late 1948 were a member of the National Cabinet, an
Ambassador, a national delegate to the UNO, a member of the Executive
Committee of the Asian Relations Conference, a member of the
Congress Working Committee and a governor of a province.41 The key

38
Note of 18 February 1957, ‘Women Police: Recommendations of the PRC’, Home
Police A, Box 389, File 662/47 UPSA.
39
‘Recommendations of the Second All-India Conference for Moral and Social Hygiene,
26 and 27 December 1951, ‘Women Police: Recommendations of the PRC’, Home
Police A, Box 389, File 662/47 UPSA.
40
For a detailed survey of the AIWC’s origins and development, see Parr, ‘Citizens of
Everywhere’, chapter 1.
41
Sumant Mehta, ‘As Others See Us’, Roshni III, 11 (December 1948), pp. 34–5.
194 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in Postcolonial South Asia

Figure 5.1 Meeting of the All-India Women’s Conference,

December 1947.
Photo by Keystone/Stringer/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

AIWC office-holders from UP in the 1948–9 period were Lakshmi

N. Menon from Lucknow, who was editor of the organization’s main
publication Roshni, and Hajrah Begum, who was representative of the
Lucknow Women’s Association (and branch representative for UP).
Also involved in these early post-independence years were Molina Ghosh
from Allahabad (branch representative for Agra, UP) and Prakashvati
Yash Pal from Lucknow.42 The total budget for the AIWC was modest –
around Rs. 30,000 per year, most of which was consumed by the cost of
producing AIWC publications.43
The AIWC possessed a very varied and uneven regional membership.
In UP – India’s most populous state in 1949 – its membership totalled
894, with a predominance of women hailing from its western districts.
But Delhi’s membership alone almost equalled that at 863, while
Bombay boasted 7,393. Other states were also better represented than

42
All-India Women’s Conference (hereafter AIWC), Institutional Papers, Reel
33 NMML.
43
January 1948 Meeting of the Standing Committee held at the Lady Willingdon College
Hostel, Madras, AIWC Institutional Papers, Reel 33 NMML.
 Post-1947 India 195

the north – Maharashtra had 6,607 members, Madras 1,465 and Andhra
7,740. The two UP sections, therefore, only had six and three Annual
Conference delegates (for Agra and Oudh, respectively) out of a total
number of 308.44 In this sense, the AIWC did not have a membership
that was directly related to, or reflective of, the demographics of India as
a whole. The organization was quite self-aware of these limitations: in
1948, it admitted that the four branches in the Bombay region made up
around 50 per cent of the total membership, and that there were some
very large cities with no branches and villages were rarely reached. The
organization needed ‘to do more than pass resolutions and actually set up
wards and other committees through India’.45
To a great extent, unlike many of the caste and community-based
rights movements that began to develop over the same period and later,
the AIWC’s ideas about women’s rights fitted squarely into a secular
conception of universal rights of the citizen, as defined by India’s
forthcoming Constitution. In its September 1948 issue of Roshni, the
lead article stated that
The Dominion of India is a secular state, says the Prime Minister [Nehru].
Nothing could be more agreeable to the progressive citizen. Nobody has so far
raised a voice of protest. Then, we ask why are the people treated to privileges,
concessions and reservations? In a secular democratic state there should be no
place for caste, creed and sex distinctions. There could be only citizens and not
communities.46
As such, the AIWC saw its role as squarely situated in the realization of
such civic rights, on the basis of what it saw as universal democratic
values. In this sense, it was especially concerned with the promotion of
education as a means to the enjoyment or exercise of citizenship. In the
lead-up to India’s first general elections, the AIWC Presidential Address
by Urmila Mehta argued that:
Adult franchise will have no meaning unless the entire people are educated to the
minimum extent of being able to read and write … The Women’s Conference
can undertake this work on a nation-wide basis and assist the governments and
other social bodies in this task, by organizing a network of literacy classes for
women all over the country.47

44
‘Allotment of Delegates to Branches for the Twenty First Session of the Conference in
Gwalior – January 1949’, AIWC Institutional Papers Reel 33 NMML.
45
Mehta, 'As Others See Us', pp. 34-5..
46
‘In the Light’, Roshni III, 8 (September 1948), pp. 2–3.
47
‘What the President Said: Extracts from Shrimati Urmila Mehta’s Speech at the Opening
of the 21st Session, Gwalior’, Roshni IV, 2–3 (February–March 1949), pp. 7–12.
196 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in Postcolonial South Asia

Added to this focus on education, the AIWC set out to have a very broad-
based rights agenda. In September 1949, it changed the ‘Aims and
Objectives’ section of its Constitution to reflect this goal. Its new six-
point programme was ambitious:
(1) To work for a society based on the principles of social justice, personal
integrity and equal rights and opportunities for all; (2) To secure recognition of
the inherent right of every human being in the essentials of life such as food,
clothing, housing, education, social amenities and security, in the belief that these
should not be determined by accident of birth but by planned social distribution;
(3) To support the claim of every citizen to the right to enjoy basic civic liberties;
(4) To stand against all separatist tendencies and to promote greater national
integration and unity; (5) To help women to utilize to the fullest the
Fundamental Rights conferred on them by the Constitution of the Indian
Union; and (6) To cooperate with peoples and organizations of the world for
the implementation of these principles which alone can assure permanent
international amity and world peace.48

As a body interested in the rights of women as independent professionals,

one of the key AIWC campaigns of the early post-Independence period
involved women’s professional development and, once again, represen-
tation in government services in particular. This effort came to a head
almost immediately after August 1947 in relation to the need to expand
the intake of new recruits to the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and
Indian Provincial Service (IPS). In a four-column advertisement inserted
into newspapers by the Dominion Ministry of Home Affairs, entitled
‘Emergency Recruitment to the Indian Administrative and Police Ser-
vices’, the fifth clause stated that ‘Women are not eligible for appoint-
ment to the IAS and IPS’. The AIWC immediately issued a protest,
arguing that this limitation contravened the fundamental rights of equal-
ity guaranteed in the draft Constitution. Its mouthpiece publication
Roshni reported that women were considered eligible to participate in
the struggle for freedom, for the posts of governors and ambassadors, for
ministerial jobs and as delegates to international conferences. But when
it came to government service, they ended up having to be teachers or
lapsing into domesticity: ‘We would like to know if it is the policy and
intention of the government of free India to condemn women to the
position of women in countries where fascism once existed’. This was not
the first time in history, Roshni continued, that ‘a successful democracy
[had] ignored the fundamental rights of its citizens. We have seen civil

48
‘Proposed Changes in the AIWC Constitution: Changes to the Aims and Objectives’,
Roshni IV, 9 (September 1949), p. 4.
 Post-1947 India 197

liberties threatened in the name of internal security, political opposition

snubbed if not scotched in the name of unity’.49
Although the AIWC tended to lobby government by drawing direct
parallels and comparison with international contexts, it still promoted
the specific rights of women in particular areas of employment in India.
The Standing Committee at the end of July 1948, for instance, called for
an enquiry into salaries in areas of public services that directly affected
women, for example teaching.50 At the same meeting, regret was
recorded at discrimination taking place against married women employ-
ees of the Postal and Telegraph Department of the Government of India,
and it was decided to lobby the Government of India in order to get ‘the
invidious distinction abolished’.51 The women’s movement also
focussed on the employment rights of women in general and how it
varied across different states. The tendency to regard women as
second-class citizens, the Roshni lead column wrote in August 1948,
seemed to be worse in Madras, the only place that had not responded
to the demand for equal treatment in the services. Recently, it continued,
a Labour Inquiry Committee appointed under the chairmanship of
R. S. Nimbkar52 had investigated the wages of industrial workers and
recommended equal wages for both sexes.53 Maintaining a reach that
linked local to national and international, the AIWC was able, somewhat
uniquely, to adopt a critical stance regarding other larger questions in
the suppression of civil rights across India. For example, following the
decision of provincial governments in the summer of 1948 to round up
communists, Roshni quietly took up the issue of the ordinance promul-
gated by the Central Provinces government, which deprived citizens of
the right to personal freedom by taking away their right to apply for a writ
of habeas corpus and allowed arrests without warrant.54
Nevertheless, despite the immediate post-Independence concern
centred on education, the professions and government service, powerful
longer term initiatives for the promotion of women’s legal rights were
also on the agenda, especially connected to lobbying in connection with
the proposed Hindu Code Bill in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In its

49
‘In the Light’, Roshni III, 6 (July 1948), pp. 2–4.
50
Minutes of the Standing Committee of the AICC held in Patna on 29, 30 and 31 July
1948, Item 8, AIWC Institutional Papers Reel 33 NMML.
51
Ibid.
52
R. S. Nimbkar was a member of the executive committee of the Bombay Workers and
Peasants Party established in 1927, who was later elected to the All-India Congress
Committee and helped to persuade it to make Congress an associate member of the
League Against Imperialism. Later, in 1933, as one of the accused in the Meerut
Conspiracy Case, he was sentenced to twelve years imprisonment.
53
‘In the Light’, Roshni III, 7 (August 1948), pp. 2–3. 54
Ibid.
198 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in Postcolonial South Asia

July 1948 Standing Committee meeting, Kitty Shiva Rao55 reported that
the AIWC had organized deputations to meet the prime minister and the
law minister, Ambedkar, to impress upon them the urgent need to pass
the Hindu Code by the time that the August Assembly session ended, so
that it would not be postponed any further.56 The AIWC was one of the
few organizations at this time that publicly exposed the direct contradic-
tions involved in the very act of creating a Hindu Code. As the April
1949 lead article in Roshni put it:
It is also a matter of immense surprise to us that the Constituent Assembly,
having agreed to the fundamental rights of equality for men and women in all
spheres of life, having agreed to the need for a National Civil Code in free India,
the nation having also voted in favour of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights in the recent General Assembly of the United Nations, should now discuss
the rather absurd question whether the daughter should have the same share in
her father’s estate as her brother!57

As the first general elections approached, women’s organizations, with

the help of the AIWC, took more direct action in relation to the Code Bill
debates. A deputation of several of them – including the AIWC, National
Council of Women, Delhi Mahila Samaj and Congress Sewika Dal – saw
Nehru and protested against what they described as ‘the vivisection’ of
the Hindu Code Bill. The delegation pressed the prime minister on the
importance of the inheritance part of the Code and wanted ‘top most
priority given to it’. Furthermore, it told Nehru that if the inheritance
clause was not passed, women would be forced to challenge the validity
of the present inheritance law in the Supreme Court, for it conflicted
with the Fundamental Rights of the Constitution.58
There were direct attempts to persuade MPs by local branches of the
AIWC on the issue – in January 1949, Kitty Shiva Rao suggested in an
AIWC meeting
that unless you make an effort and urge on the member of the legislature
representing your town or province the urgency of taking up this measure and
asking him for his support, it will be difficult to get the Code through … I am

55
Kitty Shiva Rao (formerly Verstaendig) was the wife of Benegal Shiva Rao, journalist and
a member of the Constituent Assembly of India who was then elected representative of
the South Kanara constituency in the first Lok Sabha.
56
Minutes of the Standing Committee of the AIWC held in Patna on 29, 30 and 31 July
1948, Item 8, AIWC Institutional Papers Reel 33 NMML.
57
‘In the Light: The Hindu Code Bill’, Roshni IV, 4 (April 1949), pp. 2–3.
58
‘Women’s Protest to Prime Minister’, National Herald, 22 September 1951.
 Post-1947 India 199

therefore requesting you to write without delay to the member presenting you and
urge on him that he should support this measure.59
AIWC strategy was based on the strong belief that public campaigning
alone would not be enough to advance the rights of women, since the
true opinions of women were held in secret, and thus worked against an
obligatory public face presented by many. As Roshni reported, ‘many
women after opposing the Code in public, would quietly confide in you
that these opinions were those of the “gharwalas” [men-folk at home],
their own opinions being in favour of such equal rights of inheritance
being given to women, and guaranteed legally’.60
Roshni’s May 1949 editorial described an address, made by women
from Madras to the future first president of the Republic, Rajendra
Prasad, in which they called on him to support the Hindu Code Bill.
The fury with which Roshni reported Prasad’s reply leapt off the page:
‘We must take into account the views of not only the advanced people
but also those who are not advanced’, Prasad had responded, ‘I am sure
that if the provisions of the Code were explained to my wife, whom
I consider to be a representative of the orthodox women of India, she
would not accept them’. The editorial then took out its scalpel: ‘It is
unfortunate that Mrs. Rajendra Prasad should have been mentioned at
all. We have no doubt that Dr. Rajendra Prasad’s wife is the arbiter of his
destiny; but is it fair, we ask, to put on her frail shoulders the responsi-
bility of the happiness of millions of her sisters?’ As Roshni continued: ‘It
is almost as if the father of the family should say, when a member is ill
with some serious ailment, “We should not only take the opinion of the
expert Medical Board, but also of those who know nothing of medicine
or disease”.’ Roshni was in no doubt that the progressive women of India
were ‘more qualified to speak on the proposal than either Dr. Rajendra
Prasad or his orthodox wife. And, of course, we are sure that the latter
would express an opinion in our favour, if she were informed by one of
her sex’.61
In its attempt to work below the larger public radars of legislative
assemblies and national media, the AIWC also sought to pursue its
objectives through more local movements. It was involved in the promo-
tion of popular grassroots social movements across North India, and was
especially prominent in relation to refugee and post-Partition groups. In
its annual conferences for 1948 and 1949, the AIWC discussed the
setting up of groups at the following annual conference organized around

59
Kitty Shiva Rao to members of the Standing Committee, 10 January 1949, AIWC
Institutional Papers, Reel 33 NMML.
60
‘In the Light: The Hindu Code Bill’, pp. 2–3. 61
Ibid.
200 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in Postcolonial South Asia

‘1. Social affairs, including legal and health; 2. Education, including

culture; and 3. Economic affairs, including food’. There were some
direct statements regarding the problems of low-level corruption and
supply – the Standing Committee, for instance, recorded in its minute
that ‘the AIWC views with alarm the exorbitant prices of food, cloth and
fuel and other necessities of life and strongly condemns Government
for not taking effective measures to prevent blackmarketeering and
profiteering’. Another resolution passed by the 1948 meeting expressed
concerns at housing shortages, and demanded the requisitioning of
military barracks, the establishment of complete government control
established over rent and building materials, the accelerated construction
of building temporary tenements, and the punishment of people taking
pugree.62 It also put some of these social proposals into practice. For
example, the Honorary Secretary was tasked to issue instructions to
branches to cooperate with the government in combatting high prices
by helping with fair price shops. Likewise, the AIWC sponsored a
‘Skippo Van’ in Delhi to help with refugees, while its counterpart vehicle
in Bombay toured villages and dispensed anti-cholera vaccinations to
adivasi communities.63
The AIWC made contact with an array of more local women’s move-
ments across India too, especially in relation to their core objectives.
Members of the Standing Committee maintained correspondence with
organizations such as Dharwar Mahamila Mandal (which opposed the
Hindu Code Bill as reactionary), the Bombay Mahila Sangh and the
Federation of University Women in India.64 They worked with a number
of other agencies to promote the interests of refugee children, by helping
to run children’s homes (at first in Orissa and Malabar) alongside the
All-India Save the Children Committee.65 Later, the AIWC supported
homes in UP too, specifically one in Allahabad that took in around
100 displaced refugee children. The central government remitted forty
rupees per month for each child, including orphans, children of widows
who could not support them and children of destitute persons who had
no known relations.66 Detailed accounts of the care provided in these

62
Minutes of the Standing Committee of the AIWC held in Patna on 29, 30 and 31 July
1948, AIWC Institutional Papers, Reel 33 NMML.
63
Ibid.
64
Meeting of the Dharwar Mahamila Mandal, 4 September 1949; ‘Federation of
University Women in India. Fourteenth to Twenty First Annual Reports, 1940–1949’,
AIWC Institutional Papers, Reel 33 NMML.
65
Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay to Miss Owen, 8 February 1949, Save the Children
Correspondence, AIWC Institutional Papers, Reel 33 NMML.
66
Manmohan Kishan to Kamalevi Chattopadhyay, 31 May 1949, Save the Children
Correspondence, AIWC Institutional Papers, Reel 33 NMML.
 Post-1947 India 201

homes made their way to the AIWC, including the account of one Sindhi
boy, Tulsidas, who ran away, probably to Bombay, claiming that he
wanted to find his mother. The Allahabad member of the All-India Save
the Children Committee wrote that
The other Sindhi children tell me that this boy had a complete railway timetable
written in Sindhi in his possession and he had told them from the very beginning
that he would not remain here and would go away to Bombay.67
Interestingly, the Allahabad home – named the Swaraj Bhavan Chil-
dren’s National Institute – was set up to reflect some of the utopian
visions of the new India, moving away from older colonial boarding
schools, and placing a focus on volunteering and national service.68
Women’s movements during these early post-Independence years in
UP clearly recognized the particular role that as members of wider civil
society they had to play in challenging low-level corruption and problems
of food supply. In 1949, Roshni reported that
People openly say that they buy in the blackmarket and ignorant public opinion
sympathizes. Only a high civic conscience and a sense of the urgency of the
problem can have any effect. It is here that voluntary organisations, political
parties and other public institutions have a part to play. They can try to
convince people of the iniquity of selling or buying in the black market and, by
helping to grow vegetables, tapioca etc. on an individual small-scale basis,
increase the supplies of substitute foodstuffs to take the place of grain.
Changing eating habits was something described by Roshni as located
principally in the woman’s sphere, and hence it argued that women could
play a role in decreasing families’ reliance mainly on grains in the diet.69
Moreover, the idea of self-help citizens’ movements was proposed as a
distinctive urban model by AIWC member Purnima Banerji, in her
‘Citizens’ Self Help Leagues’. Although never fully put into effect, this
blue print involved saving food in large towns where there was rationing:
‘Those who get together should do so with the specific purpose of
helping each other and to emphasise self-reliance and voluntary effort’.
This scheme was set up not as a means of minimizing large-scale national
planning, but to prevent the emergence of a ‘culture of blame’ against a
large machinery. Citizens’ organizations would gain a bit more control
over the fair price shops at controlled rates, and provide extra food

67
Shyam Kumari Khan to Mithan Lam, Women’s Section of Relief and Rehabilitation,
24 September 1949, AIWC Institutional Papers, Reel 33 NMML.
68
See, for example ‘Monthly Progress Report of the Activities of the Swarajj Bhavan
Children’s National Institute, for the Period 15 July to 15 August 1949, dated
20.8.49’, AIWC Institutional Papers, Reel 33 NMML.
69
‘In the Light’, Roshni IV, 9 (September 1949), pp. 2–3.
202 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in Postcolonial South Asia

through them. This would also, it was hoped, have an effect on tackling
the problem of black markets. As Banerji argued, such initiatives ‘would
make a positive contribution in our city life and give birth to that intelli-
gent spirit of co-operation among citizens which is the very life and spirit
of the democratic method of living in the community’.70

Post-1947 Pakistan
In a similar fashion to developments taking place in India, the circum-
stances surrounding Partition allowed certain groups or ‘classes’ of Paki-
stani women to come forward to offer their support to the nation and its
people. A large proportion of the work involved in recovering abducted
women, for instance, fell to women themselves, particularly but not
exclusively in relation to the Punjab. Likewise, rehabilitation efforts
frequently involved women (see Figure 5.2). Partition in effect opened
up new opportunities for active welfare work to Muslim women from
privileged backgrounds, stimulating what Begum Raana Liaquat Ali
Khan, wife of the prime minister and the founder (in 1949) of the All-
Pakistan Women’s Association (APWA), optimistically described as ‘a
social revolution, the like of which history has no parallel for [in terms of]
the speed and non-violence with which it established itself and spread’.71
At APWA’s first meeting, resolutions were passed calling for free and
compulsory primary education for women; a women’s bureau to collect
statistics on working women; maternity and child welfare centres; a
college for nurses72 and a prohibition on children begging. More gener-
ally, the meeting emphasized that Pakistani women, in their different
ways, were expected by APWA to ‘fight till the end’ to defend the
interests of the new state of Pakistan. On the one hand, the status of
women had to be enhanced to enable Pakistan to claim to be a modern
Muslim state. On the other hand, women’s rights had to be articulated in
ways that would not undermine the ‘Muslim-ness’, or Islamic identity, of
the new state, since this had been the basis on which its creation had been

70
Purnima Banerji, ‘Citizens’ Self-Help Leagues’, Roshni IV, 9 (September 1949), p. 9.
71
Kay Miles, The Dynamo in Silk: A Brief Biographical Sketch of Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali
Khan (2nd ed., Karachi: All-Pakistan Women’s Association, 1974); Deepa Agarwal and
Tahmina Aziz Ayub, The Begum: A Portrait of Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s
Pioneering First Lady (New York: Viking, 2019).
72
At the Annual conference of Trained Nurses Association of Pakistan in 1952, the Punjab
Governor, I. I. Chundrigar referred to that fact that Pakistan had possessed only two
trained nurses at time of Partition, and so it was ‘a matter of national pride’ that by the
time of his speech the Association commanded a membership of 1,000 trained nurses
(seven per million people compared with the then ratio of 1 to 300 in the UK). Dawn, 19
April 1952.
 Post-1947 Pakistan 203

Figure 5.2 Fatima Jinnah (C-back row, silver-haired, clad in white),

sister of M. A. Jinnah, surrounded by women making clothes for
refugees, Governor House, Karachi, December 1947.
Photo by Margaret Bourke-White/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

supported and sanctioned.73 As the Association’s ‘Life President’,

Begum Liaquat Ali Khan repeatedly stressed that the primary duty of
Pakistani women was ‘to work towards the defence, development and
betterment of the country … this [was] not the time for [them] to sit
quietly in their homes. They [had] to come out of their homes to learn to
work and then teach others to do so’.74
Initially, a Pakistan Women’s Volunteer Service (PWVS) was estab-
lished to channel this involvement along constructive nation-building
lines. On the whole, its activities were not seen as particularly

73
For the text of her inaugural speech when APWA was set up, see Challenge and Change:
Speeches by Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, ed. F. D. Douglas (Karachi: All-Pakistan
Women’s Association, n.d.), pp. 1–4.
74
Begum H. I. Ahmed, Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan (Karachi: n.p., 1975), p. 34,
quoted in Khawar Mumtaz and Farida Shaheed, Women of Pakistan: Two Steps Forward,
One Step Back? (London: Zed Books, 1987), p. 51.
204 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in Postcolonial South Asia

controversial, largely because, as Khawar Mumtaz and Farida Shaheed

have argued, social welfare work was viewed as an extension of a
woman’s domestic role, and easier to accept. Praise was in consequence
lavished on the good deeds performed by Pakistani women social
workers, ‘gallant ladies’ without whose assistance, for instance, ‘the
stupendous task [of recovering abducted women] could not have been
successfully tackled by the authorities’.75 Large numbers of ordinary
middle-class women involved themselves in the day-to-day tasks of
organizing relief in refugee camps; collecting and distributing goods,
clothing, medicines and money; running and helping in clinics and
hospitals; and opening and operating medical dispensaries, schools and
what were referred to as industrial homes. Female volunteers under
Begum Liaquat’s leadership established, among other initiatives, an
employment exchange bureau, a ‘lost and found’ bureau, a marriage
bureau, a widows’ home and a home for abducted women. One task that
they took on was to arrange the marriage of unattached women in refugee
camps so that ‘no woman left the camp single’. During an ‘Abducted
Women’s Week’ in February 1948, launched to promote greater public
cooperation in the integration of these women into Pakistani society,
Dawn reminded its readers of the precedent set back in the days of the
Prophet Muhammad when men were encouraged to marry widows
produced by war. It accordingly called on Pakistani men to cooperate
with the Widow Remarriage Committee by taking as their wives lone
women who had been casualties of Partition violence: as one alim-cum-
refugee spokesman had announced, ‘it is the obligation of the society,
and if we fail to do our duty towards these unfortunate creatures, the
consequences will be foul and cruel, giving rise to many “immoral and
un-Islamic practices”. Our society at large stands to suffer’.76
Another expression of female mobilization on behalf of the nation in
the wake of Partition were the Pakistan Women’s National Guard
(PWNG) and the Pakistan Women’s Naval Reserve (PWNR), both of
which aimed to teach their members the basics of nursing and to train
them in physical fitness and methods of defence. But while their duties
also included an important element of social welfare work, the PWNG
and PWNR were criticized within months of their formation for permit-
ting women to march with their heads uncovered. The official response
was a compromise in the form of a duputta (scarf ) added to the uniform
to provide for greater modesty. In time, the three battalions of the
PWNG – consisting of c. 2,400 young women – was disbanded once it

75
‘Refugees in Pakistan’, 1948–49, DO142/438 UK National Archives (hereafter UKNA).
76
Dawn, 12 February 1948.
 Post-1947 Pakistan 205

was decided that it had served its purpose.77 Uniforms remained a sore
point, however. For one anonymous member of the PWNR who had her
letter published in Dawn in December 1951, the rising cost (from Rs. 25
to Rs. 80) of buying her uniform ignored the impact of the austerity of the
early 1950s on the Reserve’s less affluent recruits. But worse for her, and
reflective of the class divisions within it, was the fact that the behaviour of
PWNR officers was ‘always humiliating’:
They look down upon us as if we are their personal servants. As you may be
aware, most of [us] come from respectable and educated families. So far as I am
concerned I do not remember a single occasion when I have been rebuked by my
parents even, but here we are ridiculed and abused in a most discourteous
manner. Incidentally, I may mention that the PWNR is a volunteer service and
no member is paid any emoluments whatsoever. We have got certain other
grievances of serious nature but I do not want to publicise them and would try
to bring home those also to the authorities concerned on suitable occasions.
I hope that the high ups in the navy will pay their immediate attention to these
matters.78
Such social activism, however, did not take place in a vacuum. As our
earlier chapters have shown, once Pakistan had come into existence,
and the immediate confusion of Partition had passed, the country (like
India) entered a period of intense nation-building debate as to its
identity and what shape its institutions – constitutional, political and
legal – should take. Indeed, the Objectives Resolution passed by the
Pakistan Constituent Assembly in March 1949 set in motion intense
discussion about the role of religion in the functioning of both state and
society, and in the process raised questions in relation to what specific
role women as ‘citizens’ ought to play. Intensive lobbying ensued,
carried out by those who sought to protect and enhance women’s rights
as citizens by putting pressure on the state to intervene proactively
on their behalf. And education, as before Independence, was often
viewed as the key to meaningful future changes. In October 1948, for
instance, Zeb-un-Nissa Hamidullah in her Dawn column featured the
importance of female education (albeit not necessarily a western one)
and the expansion of educational institutions as a necessary first step
for women to be able to operate as full-fledged citizens within the new
state of Pakistan.79 She likewise placed stress on women abandoning
purdah as the correct ‘patriotic’ practice for women as citizens to follow,
asking,

77 78
Mumtaz and Shaheed, Women of Pakistan, p. 52. Dawn, 29 January 1952.
79
‘Thru’ a Woman’s Eyes’, Dawn, 11 October 1948.
206 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in Postcolonial South Asia

Should we, the women of Pakistan, continue to veil our faces and take a back seat,
or should we cast aside the burqa [veil] and its restrictions and prejudices and
step forward to claim our rightful place as equal partners of our men folk in the
service of our nation? The task is not as easy as it may appear. Often it is not
within our power to decide whether we should go veiled or not. Men have a great
deal to say on the matter and as we are both socially and economically dependent
upon them, their word is law in the majority of Pakistani households. The very
fact that the more intellectual among the males are the more zealous supporters of
our anti-purdah drive, while the most relentless opponents are generally
uneducated, narrow-minded and reactionaries should encourage us to proceed
with our fight … For the nation to rise to its full stature, men and women must
march side by side … We should use our freedom not for social or moral excesses
but in social services and intellectual pursuits. Even when we shed the veil, we
should remain true Muslims at heart.80
Citizenship in Pakistan during these transition years, as in India, thus
often ended up being framed in terms of personal responsibility and
commitment to nation-building. But when it came to women’s involve-
ment in formal political processes, the situation in Pakistan differed in
that women’s organizations there tended to support the continued reser-
vation of seats for women at both central and provincial level. During its
protracted process of constitution-making, the two female members of
the Pakistan Constituent Assembly – Begum Jahan Ara Shahnawaz and
Begum Shaista Ikramullah – repeatedly demanded that 10 per cent of
seats be reserved for women in the country’s first two elections at least.
Drawing on the political experience that they had themselves acquired
before Independence, they argued that until conservative elements in
Pakistan society were ready to accept women as politicians and legisla-
tors, reserved seats would still be needed to ensure the presence of
women in politics and policy-making.81
The provision of separate seats for women, however, remained a
controversial topic. In October 1952, at an All-Pakistan Local Bodies
conference session, presided over by Begum Salma Tasadduq Hussain,
‘great controversy was raised on the proposal to reserve seats for women
on local bodies. Supporters of the proposal underlined the importance of
the role which women of Pakistan were to play in the development of the
country while those who were opposed to the proposal doubted whether
Islam permitted women to take part in such activities’. Supporters of the
proposals also pointed out the contribution that women had made to
securing the state of Pakistan, and asked how many men had volunteered
to rescue the estimated 40,000 abducted Muslim women as yet unrecov-
ered. Eventually, it was agreed that separate representation should be

80 81
Dawn, 20 January 1948. Shahnawaz, Father and Daughter, p. 248.
 Post-1947 Pakistan 207

allowed for women on local bodies as a matter of principle, with 25 per

cent of the total number of seats on city corporations reserved for them.
As regards other local bodies, it was decided that a tenth of the seats
should be set aside, but in any constituency where women candidates
were not available empty seats should be filled by men. At this point,
those present who were not in favour of the proposal staged a walk out in
protest.82
Issues connected with what citizenship in practice meant for Pakistani
women continued to surface regularly through this period, often linked
to occasions when female activities challenged prevailing understandings
about their ‘proper’ or acceptable role. In November 1951, following the
assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan, for instance, trouble broke out at his
chehlum (mourning) ceremony held in Karachi’s Aram Bagh public park,
during which ‘certain women’, accused of cutting the loudspeaker wires,
had ‘created rowdyism’, including an alleged insult to the late prime
minister’s mother. Begum Wilayat Butt, treasurer of the Khawateen
(women’s) Muslim League, censored these protestors for their ‘un-
Islamic ways’, and claimed that they were being used by ‘a certain
faction’ in the League to prop up its waning influence; she warned them
‘to behave decently and not spoil the good name of Muslim women or
Almighty God [would] sooner or later chastise them’.83 Another League
worker, Begum Muhammad Hussain Khan, then sought to put the
record straight:
As the facts have been misreported, I would like to present the truth for the
information of the public. All that happened was that instead of offering Fateha
[prayers], for which the meeting was called, some ladies tried to move a
resolution of no-confidence against the Karachi Muslim League. Most of the
ladies objected to it, saying that the sanctity of the occasion did not permit raising
of such a question. They insisted that Fateha should be offered at the meeting, to
which the movers of the no-confidence meeting were not agreeable. … The
report that [Liaquat’s] mother or for that matter anyone else was insulted is
absolutely false and baseless.84
In response, the Working Committee of the Karachi Khawateen Muslim
League issued a statement in which it expressed surprise at Begum
Muhammad Hussain’s explanation, claiming that ‘elements who had
occupied the dais long before the scheduled time had come with the set
purpose of creating disturbance in the meeting’, including efforts made
to disrupt proceedings by disabling the microphone, raising slogans and

82 83
Dawn, 28 October 1952. Dawn, 4 December 1951.
84
Dawn, 8 December 1951.
208 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in Postcolonial South Asia

even throwing dust on the dais where Liaquat’s mother had been
seated.85 That the wider religio-political environment was creating
challenges was reflected that same month in an attempt in the Punjab
Legislative Assembly to introduce a so-called ‘Purdah Bill’. According to
the independent MLA, Maulana Abdus Sattar Khan Niazi, the people of
Pakistan had fallen ‘under the spell of the false and deceptive values of
the Western culture’, and so his bill was aimed at stopping ‘the growing
danger of women casting off their veil with all its consequential evils’ and
restoring ‘woman to the place reserved for her by Islam’. Abdul Waheed
Khan (Muslim League member of the Assembly), who opposed the bill,
argued that ‘the disease which the mover wanted to eradicate’ would not
be ‘cured’ by introduction of a penalty. Rather the way to solve the
problem was education and ‘training people on right path’; and the
motion was duly rejected.86
Lack of consensus about what being a citizen of a Muslim state meant
for women was reflected in other developments taking place in Karachi in
1951–2. As Pakistan’s federal capital, the city housed both politicians and
top bureaucrats, precisely those men whose wives, daughters and sisters
proved themselves to be stalwart supporters of APWA. But APWA, while
claiming to speak for Pakistani women as a whole, was first and foremost
representative of a particular class of Pakistani womanhood (in this sense,
like the AIWA in India), a handicap that contemporaries recognized and
about which they occasionally complained. Frustration at the so-called
‘Big Begums’ who dominated APWA became increasingly apparent,
sometimes expressed individually, on other occasions reflected in the
establishment of rival organizations.87 Indeed, according to Ayesha Jalal,
those women who concerned themselves with extracting concessions
from the Pakistani state in the years immediately following 1947 belonged
mostly to the dominant classes, and so, for Jalal, it was precisely their
privileged background that ensured that APWA’s demands would be
neither too radical nor overly embarrassing for the authorities.88
In April 1952, a new women’s organization, Bint-i-Pakistan – in a
move that openly challenged APWA’s authority – held its first meeting
not in Karachi but in Lahore, where its main sponsor, the veteran activist

85 86
Dawn, 15 December 1951. Dawn, 23 December 1951.
87
‘Women and Politics’, 25 October 1955, 350/10-251955 US National Archives
(hereafter USNA).
88
Ayesha Jalal, ‘The Convenience of Subservience: Women and the State in Pakistan’, in
Women, Islam and the State, ed. Deniz Kandiyoti (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991),
pp. 77–114.
 Post-1947 Pakistan 209

Fatimah Begum,89 was elected president. The meeting was attended by

over 400 women ‘representing various walks of life’.90 As Fatimah
Begum explained, Bint-i-Pakistan’s main purpose was to enable poor
women to take an active part in the development of Pakistan. Referring
obliquely to APWA, she argued that existing women’s organizations,
thanks to being restricted to ‘the wives of the high officials and the rich’,
did not offer opportunities to middle-class and poor women to better
their social or economic standards. Bint-i-Pakistan, in contrast, commit-
ted itself to opening schools where education would be free and stipends
provided to ‘deserving girls’;91 and at a later press conference held in
Karachi, she reiterated that its aims were ‘to safeguard the rights of
women and work for uplift of the masses in various parts of Pakistan’.
A membership drive followed in the federal capital, and by July, the
organization claimed a membership of c. 11,000.92 Soon afterwards,
other dissenting voices also surfaced in the city. At a local meeting of
the ‘Muslim Countries Women’s Organisation’ held in Karachi in
August the following year, demands were made for improved local
female representation, with delegates ‘completely dissatisfied with allo-
cation of three seats for women in the Karachi Municipal Corporation’,
demanding instead that they should enjoy adequate representation on
basis of their population, with at least twenty-five seats given to them.93
Meanwhile, female ‘shyness’ was blamed as the main difficulty faced by
enumerators appointed by the Corporation to register voters for next
municipal elections; women, it appeared, did not ‘tell their names and
ages when … approached by lady enumerators’.94
All the same, the way in which female assertiveness with respect to
their rights as citizens generated anxieties can be gauged from the vio-
lence directed against women during the Independence Day celebrations
in different cities of Pakistan, including Karachi, in August 1952.95

89
Fatimah Begum (1890–1958) was appointed general secretary of the Islamic Association
of Women established in 1908, and was later the founding principal of Jinnah Islamia
College for girls in Lahore. She was an active Muslim Leaguer who campaigned actively
on its behalf in the 1940s. For more discussion of her activities during this period, see
Dushka Saiyid, Muslim Women of the British Punjab: From Seclusion to Politics
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), chapter 6 ‘Political Activism’.
90
The meeting on 30 April also elected Begum Sikandara Babar as secretary and Begum
Salma Tassaduq Hussain and Begum Bashir Ahmed as vice presidents. Dawn,
3 May 1952.
91 92
Dawn, 20 April 1952. Dawn, 8 July 1952; Dawn, 16 July 1952.
93 94
Dawn, 5 August 1952. Dawn, 26 July 1952.
95
Nazimuddin’s 1952 Pakistan Day speech emphasized the dangers of internal disorder
over external attack, reiterating that while he was ‘a firm believer in the principle of
freedom of speech and the freedom of the Press’, he was also ‘against the misuse of these
freedoms’. See Dawn, 17 August 1952.
210 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in Postcolonial South Asia

The Karachi festivities, held in the Aram Bagh, had become customary
for all large-scale public events, and drew up to 20,000 participants who
listened to Urdu poetry and songs, as well as to speeches that were
viciously anti-central government, anti-Nazimuddin (the then prime
minister) and anti-Ahmadi. (This was the time of the anti-Ahmadi cam-
paigns of the early 1950s.) The gathering was marred, however, by
physical attacks on women by so-called goondas (thugs) and, in the
context of wider debates over the place of religion in Pakistan’s future
constitutional arrangements, this violence focussed attention on
women’s disputed status as citizens within the new state.
On the evening of 14 August, women celebrating the national festiv-
ities in the city (as was also the case in Lahore and Rawalpindi) ‘were
manhandled in the most disgraceful manner. Burqas were removed
forcibly … but the police who were there did nothing’ until around
three hours had elapsed.96 APWA’s Working Committee swiftly passed
a resolution strongly condemning the hooliganism involved, and reli-
gious groups were blamed for instigating the abuse.97 A Goonda
Act was then implemented in the province.98 But Zeb-un-Nissa
Hamidullah’s column captured the wider disappointment and frustra-
tion caused by this incident, framing the abuse of women as a national
disgrace:
Hundreds of my sex felt as I did, hundreds of us felt shamed and shaken to the
very cores of our being by the shameless acts of goondaism [sic] directed against
us on the night of our Independence Day. It seemed as though a dirty, hairy hand
had come from out of the crowd and thrown a fistful of gutter filth upon our flag,
besmirching its beauty and heaping humiliation upon us. Yet, this is the most
poignant and ironic fact of all, that it should be on Pakistan Day itself that
Pakistani men should so shame their women; and that the moment chosen
should have been one when our patriotic pride was at its height.

Hamidullah was scathing in her criticism of what she regarded as bar-

baric deeds, and the particular men who had perpetrated them. But, as
she went on, with growing public and private condemnation of the
incident in the weeks that followed, ‘we women found our hurt and
humiliation dissolve – dissolve and completely melt away with the know-
ledge that the goondas who were responsible for these foul acts were not
even entitled to be called Pakistanis. For they are the scum that is washed

96
Dawn, 22 August 1952. 97
‘Shameful’, Dawn, 28 August 1952.
98
‘Goonda Act promulgated in Sind (21 Oct)’, Dawn, 22 October 1952. The act came into
force with immediate effect, and empowered the authorities to detain people considered
to be bad characters. By October, nearly 2,000 so-called goondas had been identified in
the Hyderabad and Sukkur districts of Sindh.
 Post-1947 Pakistan 211

up from the sea; flotsam from the wreck of undivided India washed upon
our shore’.99
By no means did all Dawn’s readers agree with Hamidullah. One
dissenting correspondent, Mujahid Saghir Ahmed, writing from Karachi,
in effect blamed women themselves together with the negative effect of
recent efforts to ban prostitution in the city. Ahmed, having held
‘immoral women’ responsible for the violence, then concluded by calling
for education to be remodelled: ‘We should see that our younger gener-
ation instead of roaming in streets [sic] gets proper education, healthy
environments and good society so that they prove themselves in their
coming years as respectable citizens of a free and progressive country,
Pakistan’.100 The same issue of the newspaper contained a lengthy report
from Hyderabad (Sindh) on the likely impact of the Goonda Act on the
province, detailing ‘goonda’ involvement in brothels and other antisocial
activities and bemoaning the fact that ‘girls passing on foot, in cars or
other vehicles are stopped, harassed, insulted and often molested’.101
By the early 1950s, as discussions over Pakistan’s future constitutional
arrangements gathered pace, including the question of restructuring the
political balance between the eastern and western wings of the country,
the paucity of female involvement within its political decision-making
process had become untenable for many female activists. A letter to
Dawn from Begum Soghra Raza reflected the growing impatience that
existed for improved female representation at the highest level, and
emphasized that they had earned their reward through their support for
the new state:
Muslim women did not in any way lag behind men in playing their part in the
great Muslim nationalist movement which culminated in the establishment of
Pakistan. Again during the last four years of our independent national existence,
women have worked with the utmost zeal and energy to create general awakening
and to promote the social, cultural and economic wellbeing of the people.
Pakistan being a new state faced a host of problems concerning the uplift of its
female population, it is imperative that women should have a more effective voice
in the country’s legislature. It is self-evident that points of view, needs and
grievances can best be represented in the legislature by ladies who have worked
among the generality of women and have gained experience of their problems.
Raza called on the Central Parliamentary Board of the Pakistan Muslim
League to select at least one suitable ‘lady candidate’ for what were at the
time six vacant Constituent Assembly seats.102 But her pleas fell on deaf

99 100 101
Dawn, 30 August 1952. Dawn, 3 September 1952. Ibid.
102
Dawn, 9 October 1951.
212 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in Postcolonial South Asia

ears, and by the time that the Assembly was dismissed in October
1954 there had been no increase in its female membership.103
One response to this apparent stalemate was APWA’s growing
emphasis on the need to cultivate what it termed ‘responsible citizenship’
among the nation’s womenfolk. At its annual conference held in Sukkur
in February 1954, members urged the Pakistani authorities to bring in
experts from abroad to train a cadre of women in leadership to work in
the field of not just social but political rights as well. Indeed, it could be
argued that the Sukkur meeting marked the beginning of efforts to
expand APWA’s work from its emergency beginnings to the more endur-
ing task of building up ‘an active and intelligent public opinion on the
side of a better life and a better nation’.104 The Aga Khan, while on a visit
to his many followers in Karachi the same month, added his voice to calls
for women to play a more prominent role in Pakistani life. In a speech
read out by his wife to a reception held in his honour by APWA, he called
on women to ensure religious freedom by participating in communal
Friday prayers. Mosques, in his view, needed to open their doors to
women. After all a country was like a human body – men and women
represented its lungs and both of them were needed to function
properly.105
The mid-1950s saw no slackening in terms of public debate centred on
the rights of women in Pakistan. Rather, women’s legal rights in relation
to marriage became the vehicle for wider discussions. One particular area
of disquiet that surfaced was the question of polygamous marriages, and
female activists again presented their arguments primarily in terms of
what was best for the nation. In February 1954, in an open letter to Prime
Minister Mohammad Ali Bogra, leading APWA organizer Begum Anwar
Ghulam Ahmed spelt out in no uncertain terms what she regarded as the
long-overdue need for reforming the country’s marriage laws. Despite
more women entering various professions, marriage continued to be
their generally accepted ‘career choice’, and so, according to her, the

103
Its dissolution on 24 October 1954 was closely bound up with fears among West
Pakistani interest groups – politicians, bureaucrats and military alike – that, under
Bogra’s premiership, the constitutional formula that was taking shape was going too
far in favour of East Pakistan. The proposed unification of West Pakistan into one unit,
which was intended to create an artificial parity between it and the more populated
eastern half of the country, had been rejected by the Muslim League’s assembly party.
There was, however, little chance of it being enacted under the existing political
arrangements, hence the dissolving of the Constituent Assembly. See Ayesha Jalal,
The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan’s Political Economy of Defence
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 185–93.
104 105
Dawn, 28 February 1954. Dawn, 7 February 1954.
 Post-1947 Pakistan 213

gravest danger to the well-being of the Pakistani home, and by extension

the nation, was the ‘unintelligent operation’ of existing marriage laws:
The woes of a large number of women – and the indignities they suffer (physical,
mental and financial) at the hands of wayward husbands are appalling. Divorce
and polygamy hang over the heads of Muslim women as an ever-present and
disruptive menace. The erstwhile mistress of a home can, without reasonable
cause, be turned into a destitute through an irresponsible divorce or reduced to a
chattel in her own home by the husband contracting a second marriage.
Since, in Begum Ghulam Ahmed’s view, the security of the home had to
be preserved for the nation to develop and prosper, she urged the
government to set up a commission, comprising eminent jurists as well
as women’s representatives, to produce recommendations on the reform
of Muslim personal laws.106 In a late 1954 column, Zeb-un-Nissa
Hamidullah deliberately challenged women to take responsibility for
the problem, particularly those second wives who considered themselves
as progressive, educated and enlightened, and who consequently, in her
view, were even more remiss than their polygamous husbands. As she
reminded her readers, citizenship was not only about harnessing rights, it
was about exercising responsibility too.107 Such discussions set the scene
for the public furore that was sparked a few months later by the polyg-
amous marriage of Pakistan’s prime minister, Bogra, which exposed the
extent of dissent and disagreement over women’s rights as equal citizens,
not just between female activists and the state, but also between women
and men, and among women themselves.108 They also helped initiate the
process that eventually resulted in the (radical for its time) reform of
Muslim personal law under Ayub Khan in the shape of the 1961 Muslim
Family Law Ordinances.109
Following the announcement of the wedding of Bogra to his Lebanese-
born former social secretary Aliya Saddy in April 1955,110 a large meet-
ing was held in Karachi, attended by representatives from major
women’s organizations as well as a number of prominent social workers.

106 107
Dawn, 18 February 1954. Dawn, 18 December 1954.
108
The following account draws on Sarah Ansari, ‘Polygamy, Purdah and Political
Representation: Engendering Citizenship in 1950s Pakistan’, Modern Asian Studies 43,
6 (2009), pp. 1421–61.
109
Freeland Abbot, ‘Pakistan’s New Marriage Law: A Reflection of Qur’anic
Interpretation’, Asian Survey 1, 11 (January 1962), pp. 26–27; Sylvia A. Chipp, ‘The
Role of Women Elites in a Modernizing Country: The All-Pakistan Women’s
Association’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Syracuse University, 1970), pp. 170–4;
Sylvia Chipp-Kraushaar, ‘The All-Pakistan Women’s Association and the 1961 Muslim
Family Laws Ordinance’ in The Extended Family: Women and Political Participation in
India and Pakistan, ed. Gail Minault (Columbia: South Asia Books, 1981), pp. 263–85.
110
Pakistan Fortnightly Summary, 1–14 April 1955, DO35/5285 UKNA.
214 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in Postcolonial South Asia

President of APWA’s Karachi branch, Begum Chaudhry Mohammad

Ali,111 took the lead, urging that women form a new body specifically
charged with seeking to safeguard their legal rights. The meeting then
called for a boycott of second wives, as well as the parents of such women
and their relatives, and insisted that the prime minister treat both his
wives with complete equality, including their participation in social func-
tions, as Islamic justice dictated. The meeting presented its criticism in
patriotic terms, insisting that the official status of ‘first lady’ should
remain with Bogra’s first wife Begum Hamida alone, on the grounds that
‘she is a Pakistani [and] Pakistani women [would never] tolerate, leave
alone recognize, a non-Pakistani as their “first” lady’.112 Another
gathering was then held under the joint auspices of various women’s
organizations, including the Karachi Khawateen Muslim League,
the Anjuman-i Taraqqi-i Urdu, the Khawateen-i-Pakistan and the
Khawateen-i-Anjuman-i-Tablighul Islam, at which a unanimous reso-
lution was passed expressing resentment at the second marriages of
some of the country’s politicians, and demanding that the authorities
pass a law to force polygamous husbands to accord equal treatment to all
their wives.
To many of those who participated in these debates of the mid-1950s,
it was very important that women, as equal citizens, should enjoy and
benefit from the same legal rights as Pakistani men. Just as custom and
social conservatism were believed to be preventing women from playing a
full part in the political life of the nation, so these same factors were
blamed for undermining their position in other ways. APWA itself
addressed the question of the status of women, including the specific
problems posed by polygamy, at a conference that it held in Karachi in
February 1955. Although attendees expressed satisfaction that women in
Pakistan possessed equal rights to men in the political field (at least as far
as the right to vote was concerned), the meeting advised women to
exercise their voting rights in such a way that ‘really deserving’ people
were elected. It also called on the authorities to ensure that marital
disputes in courts were resolved more quickly. With a female literacy
rate of only 4 per cent, women were bound to remain ignorant of their
rights. Hence, speakers demanded further educational provision for girls,
including free schooling up to matriculation, irrespective of family
income.113

111
Begum Chaudhry Mohammad Ali was the wife of the then Central Minister of Finance,
Chaudhry Mohammad Ali, who would later become prime minister himself following
Bogra’s dismissal (August 1955).
112 113
Dawn, 16 April 1955. Dawn, 22 February 1955.
 Post-1947 Pakistan 215

In April 1955, however, a separate ‘League for the Rights of Women’

was formed to spearhead protest against Bogra’s marriage. Begum
Chaudhry Mohammad Ali was chosen as its president. Subcommittees
followed, with Begum Anwar Ghulam Ahmed appointed the chair of its
committee on women and family laws.114 APWA itself was divided over
the issue. Instructed by Raana Liaquat Ali Khan that APWA should
disassociate itself as an organization from the controversy, supporters of
the agitation felt the need to clarify whether or not they were conducting
the kind of personalized attacks for which they were now being criticized.
According to one of the less elite campaigners, Arshia Alwi,
We the women of Karachi have formed a board which has decided to work
independently. Our aim is to demand the Islamic rights of women in Pakistan
(APWA as an association has not been working for our rights). … Thousands of
women have been ruined on account of second marriages, and women are
suffering from misery and pain. … The Nation expects all good actions from a
‘Leader’. The example of a ‘Leader’s’ life furnishes the Nation a model which the
Nation should follow.115
Following the spread of the protest from Karachi to other Pakistani
cities,116 a five-member deputation representing the League for the
Rights of Women met the prime minister on 10 May. As a result of their
ninety-minute interview, Bogra issued a public assurance a few days later
that he would continue to act fairly towards his first wife, who would be
completely free to operate according to her own best interests at all times.
He also promised that during his next ‘First-of-the-Month’ Radio
Pakistan broadcast to the nation he would announce the establishment
of a high-powered commission to consider the need for reforming the
country’s marriage and family laws and report back within six months of
being constituted. On the grounds that their only objective had been to
fight for the ‘Islamic rights’ of Pakistani women, the League’s executive
accepted the prime minister’s offer.117

114
Wife of the Secretary of the Interior and prominent APWA member, Begum Ghulam
Ahmed, represented Pakistan at the United Nations in 1954 on questions affecting the
status of women, see Pakistan Fortnightly Summary, 24 November–8 December 1954,
DO35/5284 UKNA. By March 1955, she had been elected vice chair of the UN Status
of Women Commission, see Dawn, 16 March 1955.
115
Dawn, 20 May 1955.
116
The Hyderabad (Sindh) branch of APWA, for instance, added its voice to the clamour
on 26 April, urging women to launch a strong campaign to fight polygamy. Dawn, 27
April 1955.
117
Dawn, 15 May 1955. According to Begum Liaqat Ali Khan, Bogra had apparently been
prepared to divorce his first wife, but because this was not what his wife wanted – she
wished to retain her security and status as a wife – so her supporters were forced to
216 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in Postcolonial South Asia

When Pakistan’s second Constituent Assembly was reconstituted later

that same month, however, it contained no female members, and com-
plaints not surprisingly ensued. The Muslim League’s Khawateen Sub-
Committee lost little time in signalling its obvious disappointment by
strongly condemning ‘the women MLAs of the Punjab who in spite of
assuring the Muslim League Parliamentary Board did not vote for the
official woman candidate’. Its members insisted on ‘the principle of
women voting for women within the party mandate, specifically when
they are elected solely on women’s votes’.118 Begum Akhtar Hussain
from Karachi likewise highlighted the problem, complaining that ‘when
the population is not fully represented in the true sense, the popularity of
the Constituent Assembly must become doubtful. Women must have a
voice in the law-making of their country, especially when the question of
their rights is involved. If at the very outset they are ignored, how can
they hope to get justice in matters concerning them?’119
A range of women’s organizations added their voices to this criticism
of Pakistani authorities. The Executive Committee of the League for the
Rights of Women expressed its ‘deep regret’ at the absence of female
representatives at the highest level; Begum Abdul Hafiz, General Secre-
tary of the Women’s Refugee Rehabilitation Committee, appealed to the
new members of the Constituent Assembly to elect two female members
(one representing East Pakistan, one representing West Pakistan);
Begum Najma Jafari, convenor of the Anjuman-i Tahafuuz Huqooq-i
Niswan, deplored in even stronger terms women’s non-representation,
and urged women of the country to come forward to fight for their
democratic rights and the Professional and Business Women’s Club
likewise called for special provisions to ensure that women took their
rightful place in the Assembly. A gathering of the representatives of
women’s organizations that was brought together in Karachi by Begum
Haroon, APWA’s acting president, cited Jinnah – ‘let it not be said that
women have lagged behind and failed to do their duty’ – in support of its
demand that the government rectify its error.120
The complete absence of women in Pakistan’s second Constituent
Assembly, together with developments in relation to the actual drafting
of its forthcoming constitution, stimulated additional demands to male
politicians to address female needs. A meeting of the ‘Women’s Rights
Committee’ held in Lahore in August 1955 called for 15 per cent
representation for women in provincial assemblies and 10 per cent in

accept this compromise, see Mehr Nigar Masroor, Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan:
A Biography (Karachi: All-Pakistan Women’s Association, c. 1980), p. 83.
118 119 120
Dawn, 26 June 1955. Dawn, 3 July 1955. Dawn, 8 July 1955.
 Post-1947 Pakistan 217

the national Parliament. Its ten-point memorandum to Constituent

Assembly members emphasized the importance of Pakistani women
not suffering from any inequality in the future; as well as their right to
vote being confirmed, they needed to participate in ways that would
allow them an equal footing with men.121 Women’s groups thus lobbied
hard to influence the content of the proposed constitution. As one
activist later explained, their protest was just as much about protecting
the rights that women already possessed as obtaining new ones: in
Begum Jalil Asghar’s words, ‘rights [had been] won by [women] under
the guidance of Quaid-i Azam [Jinnah] and Quaid-i Millat [Liaquat],
and women [who constituted 47% of the country’s population] under no
circumstances [were going to] surrender them’.122
In late October 1955, a twelve-member delegation representing the
‘United Front of Women for Freedom and Protection of the People’s
Rights’, led by the veteran activist (and former president of the Muslim
League’s Women’s Committee) Fatimah Begum, then submitted a six-
part memorandum, or ‘Manifesto and Charter of Women’s Rights’, to
the central minister of law for inclusion in the country’s future consti-
tution. It demanded that all citizens without any discrimination of sex
should be eligible for public posts and offices on the basis of merit and
qualifications. It also called for more seats for women in the legislative
assemblies; the ineligibility of the wives of high government officials for
elections to the Legislative Assemblies or Parliament; and the establish-
ment of separate divorce and juvenile courts in the country.123 ‘Big
Begums’ came in for considerable criticism. In what was described as a
‘smouldering rebellion’ against those women who professed to be leaders
of the women’s movements, a delegation of dissidents complained to the
central Government’s Law Minister, I. I. Chundrigar that while the ‘Big
Begums’ always managed ‘to have a photographer present when they
make such gestures as distributing flood relief or organizing girls in up-
lift programmes’, their efforts were in reality ‘limited to a very few
occasions, while effectively followed up by considerable newspaper
publicity’.124
On 1 January 1956, the Pakistan Times asked whether or not the New
Year would prove to be a happier one for women. Responding to its own
question, the newspaper claimed that the need for an independent party
for women was greater than it had ever been. Rather than operating as
the appendage of existing parties, such as the Muslim League or the

121 122
Dawn, 14 August 1955. Pakistan Times, 22 April 1956.
123
Dawn, 25 October 1955.
124
‘Women and Politics’, 25 October 1955, 350.00/10-2555 USNA.
218 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in Postcolonial South Asia

Awami League, women urgently required a separate political organiza-

tion of their own, one that would be prepared to struggle for the full
realization of their basic rights. But while the Pakistan Times urged a
separate political voice for women, it categorically rejected separate
electorates: under no circumstances would these ever be acceptable to
the women of Pakistan since their impact, it warned, would only be to
marginalize them further in political terms.125 By 9 January 1956, the
second Constituent Assembly, minus any direct female involvement, had
finished drafting Pakistan’s constitutional document. Once its contents
became known, women activists were quick to decry them. Begum
Shahnawaz, among others, was ‘surprised and pained that certain basic
rights for women [had] either been left out or nullified by [its] provisos’.
Ending discrimination on the grounds of sex had found no place in the
Constitution, nor had equal pay for equal work been mentioned. Instead,
she called on ‘all the prominent women workers and women’s organiza-
tions to protest strongly against these omissions’.126
During the last week of January, a large number of women represent-
ing a variety of different women’s groups gathered, again in Lahore (by
now thanks to the introduction of One Unit, the capital of the recently
amalgamated single province of West Pakistan) rather than in the federal
capital Karachi, to discuss their constitutional rights.127 The resolutions
that they passed exposed just how far these activists were conscious of
the draft Constitution’s limitations from the point of view of how it
promoted (or failed to promote) women’s rights. They also appealed
explicitly to the members of the Constituent Assembly whose job (or
responsibility), they pointed out, was to represent both sexes equally, and
so to ensure that Pakistani women secured basic rights of equality with
men. In their view, Article 5, which referred to all citizens being equal
before the law, was not specific enough and should have incorporated
direct acknowledgement of sexual discrimination. Article 43, which dealt
with the composition of the future National Assembly, similarly came
under fire. According to the wording of this section, ‘for a period of ten
years from Constitution Day, ten seats in addition to those specified in
clause 1 – five from West Pakistan and five from East Pakistan – shall be
provided in the National Assembly for women who shall be elected from
women’s territorial constituencies delimited for this purpose’. But in the

125 126
Pakistan Times, 1 January 1956. Pakistan Times, 13 January 1956.
127
The organizations that attended this Lahore meeting included Muslim League’s
Women’s Committee, APWA, Lahore Ladies Federation for Women’s Rights,
Anjuman Muhajir Khawateen, Pakistan Christian League, Awami League Women’s
Committee, Professional Women’s Club and women members of the Lahore members
of the West Pakistan Assembly. See Pakistan Times, 26 January 1956.
 Post-1947 Pakistan 219

eyes of its female critics, it lacked clarity as to whether women would vote
for the 300 seats not earmarked specifically for them, or if and for how
long their representation would be confined to just those ten female seats
alone. Until and unless this point was clarified, these provisions, they
feared, would remain vague and risked being subsequently interpreted
either way.
On 2 March 1956, Pakistan’s first Constitution was given its assent by
the governor general, and three weeks later, on 23 March (Republic
Day), it came into force. The Constituent Assembly simultaneously
reorganized itself into the country’s legislative body, or National Assem-
bly, thus averting any immediate need for general elections in which
women alongside men could have cast their vote. Female activists asso-
ciated with the Pakistan Federation of Women’s Rights expressed their
disappointment openly. Women may have had their full voting rights
confirmed, but they had been allocated the reserved seats that at least
some activists had rejected; as Federation spokeswomen reminded polit-
icians and the public, women did not require special privileges, only
their fundamental rights as ‘workers, housewives and citizens’. But their
pleas, it seemed, had not been heeded: ‘Our leaders have called upon us
many times during the past eight years to play our full part in the life
of our nation. We in turn now call upon our leaders to guarantee
our rights’.128
Pakistani citizenship during this same period, as reactions to the
1956 Constitution highlighted, came to be differentiated along gender
lines. As well as the provision that barred a woman (like a non-Muslim)
from becoming head of state, citizenship legislation formulated in the
early 1950s prohibited Muslim mothers who were married to foreigners
or non-Muslim men from passing on their Pakistani citizenship to their
children. This was in stark contrast to the way in which the children of
Muslim men married to non-Muslim women were permitted to acquire
Pakistani nationality. In effect, this legislation stipulated that ‘legitimate’
Pakistani nationals needed to be born to a father with an ‘authentic’
Muslim identity. Since children gained citizenship with all its attendant
rights through their fathers, and not courtesy of their mothers, the
1951 and 1952 acts reinforced an explicit connection between fathers
and national citizenship.129

128
Pakistan Times, 22 April 1956.
129
‘Pakistan Citizenship Act 1951’, Government of Pakistan Press Information
Department, Handout E. No. 1384, 14 April 1951, FO372/7105 UKNA; 24 April
1951, FO327/7089 UKNA; UK High Commissioner, Karachi, to Commonwealth
Relations Office, 14 April 1952, DO35/3560 UKNA.
220 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in Postcolonial South Asia

By mid-1956, it had become clear that women’s organizations such as

the Federation were not going to secure the kind of outcome for which
they had been lobbying, either in relation to female representation in
the country’s legislative assemblies or as far as bold changes in the
content of Muslim personal law were concerned. When the Rashid
Commission, set up, as promised by Bogra, to investigate family law
reform produced its report in June 1956, it did recommend that second
wives were only permissible with official consent, and it advised the
establishment of special matrimonial courts, proposing equal rights in
divorce matters for men and women alike. But the Commission – which
included two women (Begums Shahnawaz and Anwar Ghulam Ahmed)
among its members – was unable to go as far as recommending the
complete prohibition of polygamy that female activists had urged. Instead,
the report represented, at least to those who gave it a warm reception, ‘a
sensible first step towards a society where monogamy would be the general
rule’. In this way, Pakistan would be allowed to ‘justify its name by
reverting to the original dynamic, liberal and creative spirit of Islam’.130
Pakistani women by the middle of 1956 had acquired some acknow-
ledgement of the need to strengthen their legal rights with respect to the
state’s marriage laws, but, in the view of contemporaries, Pakistani
women remained second-class citizens as far as the political role that they
were empowered to play in the life of the state. For these activists, nothing
symbolized this continuing subordinate status more than the ten reserved
seats that had been gifted to women by the 1956 Constitution, which, they
believed, had conspicuously failed to address other equally pressing issues
that disadvantaged female lives on a daily basis. On the other hand, what
the debates of the mid-1950s underlined was that as long as Pakistani
women, and their male supporters, presented their citizenship demands as
being in the nation’s interests – for the greater, national, good – there was
space to call for more individual freedoms as Pakistani citizens, and blur
the boundaries between their private and public lives.

Conclusion
In October 1958, the army seized power in Pakistan, and set about
‘cleaning up the mess’ that it blamed squarely on the civilian politicians
whom it had displaced. But as others before it had done, the military
sought to legitimize political intervention by harnessing the support of
women for its programme of reform. In June 1959, when an austerity

130
Pakistan Times, 25 June 1956.
 Conclusion 221

drive was in full force, Begum Shaikh (wife of the Minister of the Interior
General K. M. Shaikh) – who had anticipated the austerity campaign by
launching her ‘wear cotton’ crusade some months earlier – set about
increasing the membership of the Women’s Volunteer Group (WVG)
that she had recently established. Together with instructions ‘prescribing
simplified habits of dress and eating’ announced by the director of the
Bureau of National Reconstruction, Brigadier R. F. Khan, activities of
the ‘busy Begums’ bolstered regime efforts to ‘create a psychological
atmosphere which [would] promote popular participation in nation-
building activities’. At a press conference, Begum Shaikh set out the
WVG’s fundamental principles as follows:
(1) To encourage women to participate in the economic reconstruction of
Pakistan; (2) To patronize and promote cottage industries and Pakistan-made
products; (3) To observe simplicity in style of living – dress, diet, and
entertainment; (4) To live frugally ‘within our means’; (5) To save and invest;
(6) To get rid of false standards and false values ‘from our homes and our society’;
and (7) To refuse to purchase anything smuggled or at the black market price.
The WVG also committed itself to campaigning against the lavish dow-
ries that were ‘so well established’, particularly among middle- and
lower-middle-class families.
The ladies of the WVG have also been working on their husbands, to judge from
press reports. According to these reports, their husbands have been purchasing
‘khaddar’ [homespun] clothes in order to support the austerity drive launched by
their good wives … In a peculiar blend of Saville Row and the village spinning
wheel, Begum Tazeem Faridi, another WVG stalwart and wife of A.R. Faridi of
Burmah Shell, proudly announced to the press that her husband had ordered a
khaddar dinner jacket.
The chances of the WVG campaign being successful, however, looked
pretty low as far as contemporaries were concerned. According to a story
doing the rounds in Karachi not long after the military take over, ‘Begum
Shaikh, having advised a group of college girls about the “wear cotton”
campaign, asked for questions. One brave young lady stood up and
reportedly asked, ‘Tell me Begum Shaikh, were you wearing cotton when
you trapped the General”?’ Such attitudes, observers felt, were unlikely
to be helpful, even if ‘these groping efforts towards creating a public
conscious and a sense of national duty’ were a commendable ‘new
feature of life in Pakistan’.131

131
Press Information Handout, ‘Specific Measures to Promote Simple Living – An Appeal
to All Patriots – Officials to Set Example’, 11 July 1959, in US Embassy Karachi,
Despatch 57, 16 July 1959, 890d.414/7-1659 USNA.
222 Women and Differentiated Citizenship in Postcolonial South Asia

However, as this anecdote from 1959 highlights, regimes in power –

whether in Pakistan or India, and civilian or military – deployed and
called upon women, their organizations and their representatives, to rally
behind campaigns framed as being in the national good. As citizens
women were expected to contribute patriotically to the common cause.
But this episode also underlines that Pakistani and Indian women – like
the feisty college student who was prepared to pose an awkward personal
question to one of the ‘Big Begums’ – could and frequently did also
demonstrate an independence of spirit that challenged their status as
differentiated ‘second-class’ citizens.
Women’s movements in both India and Pakistan throughout these
years faced common problems in demonstrating their representative
status. In both cases, the largest groups engaged in debating issues of
constitutional rights were mostly composed of highly educated, English-
speaking women from elite backgrounds. But, again in both cases, these
movements transformed the very bases of debate about substantive citi-
zenship rights, since their claims and arguments cut across traditional
citizenship paradigms. Evoking ideas of universal rights, they set out the
particular struggles of women to acquire rights, and, in this sense, their
activism encapsulated the ways in which citizenship during the early
postcolonial period could be seen as a process of struggle, rather than a
fixed or given category. Perhaps most importantly, these women and
their movements were able to articulate a somewhat different vision of
the Indian/Pakistani public in which the relationship between private and
public life was based in patriarchal inheritance from the colonial period.
6 ‘Hidden Citizens’ in 1940s and 1950s
India and Pakistan

If 80 persons unanimously call day as night,

It is the duty of 20 to consider it as a truth.
This is a democratic age, old man – a democratic age,
We are all helpless.1

As our previous chapters have indicated, the achievement of Independ-

ence across South Asia in August 1947 brought with it the excitement of
democracy in the shape of introduction of the universal adult suffrage,
which now extended to all citizens irrespective of their class, gender or
religious identity, at least on paper. But while Indians acquired an
elaborate framework for their democracy in their 1950 Constitution, it
took until the mid-1955s, eight years after Indians had won their political
freedom, before specific citizenship legislation there was finalized and it
was clear who qualified as a citizen and who did not. Pakistanis, in the
meantime, framed their citizenship rules first in 1951 and then again in
1952 – that is, well before the country’s first constitution came into
existence albeit fleetingly in 1956 – but these were primarily concerned
with regularizing the position of people migrating from India than
addressing broader issues of civic inclusivity and belonging. What citi-
zenship meant in places such as UP and Sindh, as elsewhere in India and
Pakistan, remained work in progress, with certain groups more included
than others when it came to how their rights as citizens were formulated
in practice.
Moreover, notions of citizenship as they unfolded in both states pre-
supposed certain exclusions. The latter – what we term here as ‘hidden
citizens’ – were generated and shaped by common processes on both
sides of the border, including the material predicaments of refugees and
non-migrating minorities, which helped define inclusion and exclusion
from full citizenship rights from an everyday perspective. This chapter,

1
Extracts from English translation of an Urdu poem entitled ‘Democracy’ by Majeed
Lahori, Jang, 19 May 1957, in ‘Death of Pakistan Political Satirist’, 12 July 1957,
Despatch 36, 890D41/7-1257 United States National Archives (hereafter USNA).

223
224 ‘Hidden Citizens’ in 1940s and 1950s India and Pakistan

thus, explores issues connected with citizenship and belonging during

the late 1940s and 1950s, and in particular focusses on the differentiated
realities involved for marginalized groups – religious minorities and
economically marginalized groups, such as Dalits, tribal communities
and haris (share-cropper peasants) – who were excluded, in a range of
ways, from the ‘mainstream’ benefits of what being a citizen came to
mean in both UP and Sindh during the early post-Independence years.

Religious Minorities in Sindh and UP

In Chapter 2, we touched on the predicament of Muslim communities in
UP whose properties were declared forfeit to the state as ‘evacuee prop-
erty’, whether or not they had actually migrated. If they were deemed to
be intending to leave, then, as Vazira Zamindar has explained, their
property could be reallocated to incoming refugees in compensation for
what the latter had left behind in Pakistan.2 Such experiences were
mirrored to a large extent by those of non-Muslims in Sindh, who, in a
similar fashion, found themselves losing out materially thanks to assump-
tions about where their loyalties – both present and future – lay in the
transformed political realities after Partition. The experiences of minor-
ities in both localities in the aftermath of Partition thus highlights how far
citizenship was drawn into the debates of these years.
In relation to Pakistan, most studies of its remaining non-Muslim
minorities have concentrated on developments in Bengal, and so have
tended to gloss over the experiences of those still living in the western half
of the country. This historiographical ‘imbalance’ stems to a great extent
from the fact that it was East Bengal, later renamed East Pakistan, which
retained the largest non-Muslim minority after Independence. In con-
trast, Pakistani Punjab – where the bulk of the cross-border migration
and violence took place in the immediate run-up to and in the aftermath
of Partition – lost most of its non-Muslims, with the exception of rela-
tively small numbers of Christians3 and the even smaller community of

2
For poignant instances of this process at work, see Vazira Zamindar, The Long Partition
and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 2007), chapter 4, ‘The Economies of Displacement’.
3
According to Symonds, ‘There [were] still four hundred thousand [Christians] in the
West Punjab’ where some of them were reported to have suffered considerable hardship
in West Punjab, at the hands of ‘incoming Muslim refugees [who] complained that
Christians had looted them in East Punjab’ and took out their frustrations on them.
However, the skilful leadership by S. P. Singha, former Speaker of the Punjab Assembly,
improved their position, and they came to be included in a special reservation of five per
cent of the positions in the Services for minorities in that province. They had no
representation in the Constituent Assembly, however, and so, in his view, they not
unreasonably asked for separate electorates to continue until ‘the Muslim League as the
 Religious Minorities in Sindh and UP 225

Parsis who did not leave. Importantly, however, the prevailing focus on
the Punjab, from a Partition studies perspective, has obscured the fact
that a larger proportion of non-Muslims stayed on in Sindh, as corrobor-
ated by the 1951 census, which showed that the province contained
the lion’s share of Hindus still living in West Pakistan. One district –
Tharparkar, located in the southeast of Sindh on the border with India –
even possessed a local majority of non-Muslims, mostly low-caste
agriculturalists, who to this day eke out a fragile living from what are
dry desert-like farming conditions. But it was in Sindh’s urban centres,
where under colonial rule propertied Hindus had tended to live and work
as merchants, run their farming interests as absentee landowners or
service the professions and the bureaucracy, that their position as a
minority community emerged as a particularly sensitive issue. Cities and
towns such as Karachi, Hyderabad, Sukkur, Shikarpur and Larkana – like
their counterparts in UP – witnessed events that highlighted the new
uncertainties, and the suspicions that were directed towards non-Muslims
more generally. The right to hold, or hold on to, material assets thus
became a key indicator of ‘belonging’ in this fraught and uncertain context.
Working out who had the right to what property as Indian and Paki-
stani citizens, and how to compensate for any property losses incurred
thanks to Partition, took up a great deal of legislative and bureaucratic
time in both countries in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. As
early as September 1947, legislation in the form of the East and West
Punjab Evacuee Property (Preservation) Ordinances, which was soon
extended to Delhi, empowered custodians of refugee property to manage
vacated premises until the final whereabouts of their owners had been
decided.4 The question of what to do with this property moved quickly
from being a private to a public headache as disputes between the Indian
and Pakistani authorities increasingly centred on the relative value of the
evacuee property involved. In an attempt to reconcile competing inter-
ests, the Karachi Agreement of January 1949 signed by the two govern-
ments addressed the need for each state to reimburse the other for the
immovable property left behind by departing refugees. But which areas
were covered by this formula, whether or not it included the voluntary
sale and exchange of property and when the cut-off point for when
migration was deemed to have occurred remained matters of contention
for bureaucrats and ordinary Indians and Pakistanis alike for decades.

national political body [was] substituted by one or more political organisations open to all
communities’. See Richard Symonds, The Making of Pakistan (London: Faber & Faber,
1950), p. 99.
4
Zamindar, Long Partition, p. 123.
226 ‘Hidden Citizens’ in 1940s and 1950s India and Pakistan

As Pakistan’s minister for refugees at that time described later, the

situation was a hugely complex one, and would complicate relations
between the two countries well into the 1950s and beyond:
India does not seem to have given expression to her real reasons for opposing a
‘limiting’ date [… because] it may be that India is thinking not of Hindu/Sikh
evacuees but of Muslims still in the ‘agreed areas’ in India whose migration to
Pakistan they wish to encourage … for the imposition of a limiting date for
migration would automatically limit the Muslim evacuee property in those
areas to whatever has already been abandoned.5
Against this backdrop, the particular dilemmas facing Sindh’s non-
Muslim minorities are captured in reports sent through to Delhi by the
first Indian High Commissioner stationed in Karachi, Sri Prakasa.6 The
regularity of his reports, particularly in the months immediately following
Independence, was hampered by a lack of sufficient staff but also by the
impact of communal flare-ups such as the one that took place in late
January 1948 when recently arrived refugees from India attacked a party
of Sikhs heading for ships to take them to Bombay, and then turned on
local Hindus, resulting in around 200 deaths.7 Although many observers
were taken by surprise by the ferocity of this apparently unexpected
attack, there had been a similar outbreak of trouble in nearby Hyderabad
in mid-December which had killed some thirty people. In that city, too,
violence had been linked to incoming refugees whose tales of their own
sufferings back in India had triggered revenge attacks.8 By the end of
January, a further 40,000 Sindhi Hindus had left the province,9
prompting Prakasa to explain to Delhi that
Circumstances here [Karachi] at the present moment are very very difficult and a
good deal of my time, energy and attention is taken up by the problems
concerning evacuation. I do not know where and when all this is going to end.
You can imagine in what state of mind and body I must be at the present
moment; and so if you do not receive as many reports as you desire you will
surely understand and appreciate the reasons.10

5
Proceedings of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, 6 April 1951, cited in ibid., p. 126.
6
Sri Prakasa (1890–1971) was a long-standing Congress politician from UP, who served
as India’s first High Commissioner to Pakistan, based in Karachi from 1947 to 1949; he
was then governor of Assam from 1949 to 1950, governor of Madras from 1952 to 1956
and governor of Bombay from 1956 to 1962.
7
Despatch 18, 12 January 1948, 845.F.00/1-1248 USNA.
8
Despatch 278, 29 December 1947, 845F.00/12-2947 USNA.
9
UKHC, Karachi, Opdom 5, 15–21 January 1948, IOR L/WS/1/1599 British Library
(hereafter BL).
10
Commissioner for India in Pakistan, Karachi, to Secretary, Ministry of External Affairs
and Commonwealth Relations, New Delhi, 30 January 1948, MEA/2-1, 48 – Pak I (Vol.
I) National Archives of India (hereafter NAI). In response, Prakasa was reassured that
 Religious Minorities in Sindh and UP 227

The perspective of the Indian High Commission was certainly not neu-
tral with respect to the difficulties being faced by local Hindus, but its
assessments shed valuable light on the communal situation in Sindh
during this period:
The stress in current politics is on regarding Pakistan an [an] Islamic state where
the minorities are as foreigners. This intolerance of non-Muslims is so wide-
spread that even the Jews and Anglo-Indians are migrating. The Hindus continue
to be terribly hated and no Gandhi cap or Khadhar [sic] clothes can be seen in the
streets. All Hindus disguise themselves as Muslims wearing Jinnah caps to escape
violence at the hands of hoodlums … Not a single Hindu who has left Pakistan
intends or dares to return back, while thousands of Muslims are going back to
India.11

During the first half of March alone, the High Commission estimated
that another 20,000 Hindus had left by sea for Bombay and the
Kathiawar ports, with large numbers also crossing the land border
between Sindh and Rajasthan. Further, 23,000 more awaited evacuation
in camps set up in Karachi and Hyderabad and maintained at Govern-
ment of India expense, while others clustered in unofficial camps that
had emerged across the province in towns such as Sukkur and
Shikarpur.12
In discussions with Prakasa, M. A. Khuhro, Chief Minister of Sindh,
acknowledged that conditions had deteriorated to the extent that all
remaining Sikhs needed to be evacuated, and he agreed that most
Hindus should be allowed to migrate since it was becoming impossible
to persuade them to remain. However, Khuhro undertook to make one
more attempt to urge Sindhi Hindus to stay, and he was accompanied in
late March on a tour of different districts in Sindh by Prakasa. The tour
included three Bengali Hindu members of the Constituent Assembly
(B. N. Dutta, R. Chakravarty and Shrichandra Chatterji), who similarly
argued that it was against the interests of Sindhi Hindus to leave.13 But in
Prakasa’s view, such efforts, however well-intentioned, were bound to be
futile, for
any attempt on the part of the Authorities to keep them in Sind under the
Essential Services Ordinance or by the introduction of the Permit System only

Delhi ‘was well aware of the peculiar difficulties and handicaps under which you are
working at present’ and so would not ‘expect regular fortnightly reports from you until
the situation in Karachi eases’, Ministry of External Affairs and Commonwealth
Relations, New Delhi, to High Commissioner for India in Pakistan, Karachi,
9 February 1948, MEA/2-1, 48 – Pak I (Vol. I) NAI.
11
Fortnightly Report for the period 1–15 March 1948, 16 March 1948, MEA/2-1, 48 – Pak
I (Vol. I) NAI.
12 13
Ibid. Ibid.
228 ‘Hidden Citizens’ in 1940s and 1950s India and Pakistan

results in irritation and added suspicion [and gives rise to] widespread complaints
of bribery and corruption … The exodus is largely due to the fear complex
operating in the mind of the Hindus that something may happen in the future
which will either destroy them or result in loss of religion, honour or property
Hence, even those Hindus ‘who promised Mr. Khuhro at his Larkana
tour to stay in Sind probably did so because they could not disappoint the
Premier …; but as soon as [he] left, [they] again began to request for help
in migration’. The kinds of problems that they reported included being
robbed and molested by Muslim National Guards, the refusal by
Muslims to pay debts and batais owed to them, false claims being lodged
against Hindus and general bitterness shown by Muslims against Hindus
coupled with indifference on the part of officials when it came to protect-
ing local minorities.14 At the same time, Prakasa admitted that what had
turned out to be the hasty departure of leading Sindhi Hindus repre-
sented a massive blunder: their action, he felt, had deprived those who
remained of leadership and support, and ‘had [they] been braver, and
had they stayed back with their humbler brothers, the Hindu community
as a whole could have stood a much better chance to defend themselves
[and] agitate to the Government for the protection of their rights’.15
Reports from Karachi to New Delhi detailed the difficulties being
experienced by Hindus remaining in the province. For instance, one
Trimbaklal Joshi owned a shop in Karachi. When he was forcibly dispos-
sessed of it by two Muslims, the District Magistrate ordered his property
to be returned to him, but it was immediately reoccupied, leaving Joshi
without both his stock-in-trade and his household possessions. Similarly,
Goverdhan Vazirani, an advocate and General Secretary of the Sindh
Provincial Congress Committee, was arrested following his advice to
fellow Hindus to migrate. The fact that he was brought in handcuffs to
court was viewed as unnecessarily humiliating and, in the High Commis-
sion’s words, ‘smack[ed] of vindictiveness’. Finally, another Sindhi
Hindu A. D. Khanna had ordered certain goods to be sent from Karachi
to Delhi, but when he found out that they had not reached their destin-
ation, he tracked them down at Hyderabad Railway Station. There the
stationmaster, according to a later statement by Khanna’s father, insisted
that the goods could only be exported to India if the sender was a
Muslim, whereupon Khanna claimed to be one. When this representa-
tion was discovered to be untrue, Khanna was arrested along with a
relation who had supported his story.16 Some local Christians also
experienced similar communal intolerance. In May 1948, reports

14 15 16
Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.
 Religious Minorities in Sindh and UP 229

claimed that when a Pakistan Olympic Games was held in the city, the
Christian-owned company that had provided furniture for the event was
not paid the hire charges nor allowed to remove the furniture once the
games were over. With rumours circulating that government officials had
described them as ‘Christian dogs’ who were not wanted in Pakistan, the
incident created a sensation among local Christians, who were now
thought to be the largest minority in Karachi.17
By May 1948, there were reports of a move among Hindus ‘left
behind’ in Sindh to organize themselves either as a ‘Sind Hindu League’
since the INC had disaffiliated its units in Pakistan, or under a joint
organization consisting of all local minorities. A Hindu conference was
held at Larkana in July, and former Congress activists Holaram Keswani
and Hundraj Kukhayal also toured the province to explain why a new
political body was needed.18 Some of the main grievances that domin-
ated Sindhi Hindu calls for redress that were sent to the Government of
Sindh (no longer headed up by Khuhro who was by then under investi-
gation for maladministration and corruption) included the non-payment
of rents by Muslim tenancies to Hindu landlords, the reduction of the
rents of houses owned by Hindus to below market-letting values by rent
controllers, ‘deliberate and systematic’ attempts on the part of lower
ranking staff in the revenue and irrigation departments to describe all
Hindu property in their records as ‘abandoned’ even when their owners
still occupied it and the fact that temples and other religious buildings
remained unprotected, thus allowing Muslim squatters to move in. Calls
for the appointment of a custodian of evacuee property, however, con-
tinued to fall on deaf ears.19 And critics latched onto a speech delivered
by Liaquat Ali Khan in Hyderabad that June in which he stated that ‘In
Karachi, in Hyderabad, or in other places in Sind, all the business [had
been] in the hands of Hindus. Only in trades like camel-cart driving and
donkey-cart driving, Muslims had the monopoly. Though the grace of
God, Muslims have now taken their legitimate place in the business and
trade of Karachi’.20
Responses to difficulties faced by non-Muslims in Sindh, however,
cannot be disentangled from the way in which the predicament of their

17
Fortnightly Report for the period 1–15 May 1948, May 1948, MEA/2-1, 48 – Pak I (Vol.
I) NAI.
18
Fortnightly Report for the period 1–15 July, 25 July 1948, MEA/2-1, 48 – Pak I (Vol.
I) NAI.
19
Fortnightly Report for the period 15–31 May 1948, 8 June 1948, MEA/2-1, 48 – Pak
I (Vol. I) NAI.
20
Fortnightly Report for the period 1–15 June 1948, 16 June 1948, MEA/2-1, 48 – Pak
I (Vol. I) NAI.
230 ‘Hidden Citizens’ in 1940s and 1950s India and Pakistan

Muslim counterparts in places such as UP were discussed and how

policy consequently took shape in India. Reports from the Indian High
Commission in Karachi during this period underline this very clear and
direct flow of information between the two locations explored in this
study. In May 1948, for instance, Praskasa’s office reported the following
encounter between High Commission staff and a Muslim refugee newly
arrived from UP. According to the latter, about 30,000 Muslim Rajputs
and Meos from Delhi, Gurgaon, Alwar, Bharatpur and Mathura now
wished to return to UP and neighbouring Rajasthan, but needed help
from the High Commission. Much to their dismay, Prakasa ‘politely
dismissed’ their request for assistance on the grounds that they ‘would
be better off in Pakistan where there was ample irrigated land, which
would be given to them’. All the same, Prakasa admitted that he was
‘surprised to learn from this gentleman that all these Muslims had
definite information that their lands in India were not yet allotted to
any Hindu refugees, and would be available to them if they [went] back’.
As a consequence, the High Commissioner advised his superiors in Delhi
that, as a matter of priority, ‘the Government of India must immediately
allot to the Hindu refugees the lands and houses vacated by the Muslims
in the same way as Pakistan has allotted the lands and the houses of the
emigrating Hindus’, as this would be the ‘most effective way of discour-
aging the return of these Muslims’.21 By July, news about the impending
Pakistani authorities’ introduction of a permit system had been published
in Karachi newspapers, even before the Indian High Commission had
been officially informed. Dawn, in line with its pro-Pakistan credentials,
marked this decision with a cartoon showing Muslims thanking but
declining Prakasa’s invitation to return to India; Prakasa, who com-
plained that because the permit system had been introduced too sud-
denly it had taken Indian officials ‘completely by surprise’, responded by
highlighting the ‘crowds of Muslims’ who were surrounding his office
and asking for permits.22
Developments in UP highlight parallel tensions that increased during
this period. A couple of years later, during discussions in the Indian
Parliament on the 1950 Administration of Evacuee Property Bill,
the Minister of State for Rehabilitation – Mohanlal Saxena – gave an
undertaking that those persons who had migrated to Pakistan, but –
significantly – had returned to India before 18 July 1948, would be

21
Fortnightly Report for the period 16–30 April 1948, 1 May 1948, MEA/2-1, 48 – Pak
I (Vol. I) NAI.
22
Fortnightly Report for the period 1–15 June 1948, 16 June 1948, MEA/2-1, 48 – Pak
I (Vol. I) NAI.
 Religious Minorities in Sindh and UP 231

exempted from this law.23 However, by the early 1950s, despite the
apparently increasing liberalism of UP government policies towards
Muslims returning to this region of India, the ground realities for secur-
ing rights to property remained very difficult. Chapter 2 has already
explored the problems of Muslims as migrants/return migrants in the
immediate aftermath of Partition. Perhaps the best indication of how
Muslims managed ‘belonging’ in India in the early Independence period
can be seen in popular and civic responses to events in Pakistan. One of
the most important instances of this took place nearly three years
following Partition: the precariousness of everyday life for many Muslims
in UP was directly exacerbated by incidents of communal violence
following the violence and subsequent exodus of Hindus from East
Pakistan from March to May 1950. News of these events had a knock-
on effect for a range of Muslim organizations across North India, and
especially their perception of security. It also had direct repercussions for
minorities living across the border in Sindh.
From August 1949, reports circulated in UP of attacks on Hindu
villages in East Pakistan, particularly in the Barisal and Sylhet districts.
Then in December, in retribution for an attack on policemen involved
in the alleged rape of a suspected communist’s wife, mass violence
broke out in the Khulna district of East Bengal triggered by what
appeared to be state-sponsored attacks on non-Muslims.24 Over the
next month, an estimated 30,000 local Hindus responded by migrating
to India. In February 1950, a large-scale anti-Hindu procession in
the East Bengal provincial capital Dhaka, protesting against an
attack on a Muslim woman, prompted further attacks on Hindus in
the city and surrounding villages. What followed through February
were further incidents of violence in Barisal, Chittagong, Noakhali
and Sylhet. In total, around 180,000 Hindu refugees made their way
to India between February and May 1950 in reaction to the upsurge in
violence.25
But despite the fact that the vast majority of East Pakistan Hindus still
migrated less for reasons of direct violence and more due to a variety of
quotidian forms of discrimination,26 the response of Muslim organiza-
tions in UP was to publicly denounce the ‘communal threat’. The
arrangement of Muslim-led deputations and meetings represented in
stark form a clear statement on Muslim belonging in the new

23
National Herald, 14 March 1950.
24
Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 112.
25 26
Ibid. Ibid., pp. 111–3.
232 ‘Hidden Citizens’ in 1940s and 1950s India and Pakistan

postcolonial Indian state. On 1 March 1950 in Lucknow, Phool Singh,

MLA and secretary of the UP Provincial Congress Committee, sug-
gested that batches of ‘selfless workers’ acceptable to the Pakistan Gov-
ernment should be sent to East Bengal to live among Hindus there and to
influence Muslim opinion. Muslim divines, religious heads, ulama and
‘former’ Muslim Leaguers should, he argued, be selected.27 Following
from this, S. M. Ishaq Sambhali, member of the Provincial Congress
Committee, issued a press statement in which he argued that the violence
was a blot not just on Pakistan but also on Islam. His suggestion was that
Indian Muslims, specifically, should champion, in popular movements, a
condemnation of the violence across India:
The Muslims of the Bharat Republic should take a lead in the matter by holding
mass meetings in every mohalla and every village, appealing to all the true
believers of the world to censure these brutalities of the East Bengal goondas
and the regrettable and reprehensible attitude of the East Bengal and Pakistan
Governments.28
But such pronouncements of loyalty and protest by UP-based Muslim
leaders and associations were not necessarily spontaneous expressions of
support for the Indian Union. Rather, across the state, both high-level
and more mundane threats to minorities also elicited similar declar-
ations. In Saharanpur in western UP, for instance, a large meeting was
held at the Bankhandi-Nath ground on 3 March at which lurid tales of
arson, murder, kidnapping and looting perpetrated on Hindus in East
Bengal were narrated. The state government was urged to take immedi-
ate and strong measures to check them, and Bishan Chandra Seth,
general secretary of the Hindu Mahasabha, criticized the authorities for
what he described as their ‘weak-kneed’ policy towards Pakistan.29 In
Banaras, the Mahasabha organized a procession through the main streets
of the city, condemning the official response to events in East Bengal as
‘weak’.30
At a more general but also routine level, anti-Muslim scares and
attacks relating to Pakistan occurred in this period too. The 1950 Holi
festival in UP, for instance, was marred by a number of riots and resulting
casualties in cities such as Aligarh, Moradabad, Pilibhit and Bareilly.31

27
National Herald, 2 March 1950.
28
‘Indian Muslims Urged to Hold Protest Meetings’, Ibid.
29
‘Murder of Hindus in Pakistan: Citizens Urge Govt. to Take Strong Action’, National
Herald, 4 March 1950.
30
National Herald, 6 March 1950.
31
‘Eight Killed in Holi Incidents: Aligarh and Moradabad under Curfew’, Ibid. In some
cities, notably Kanpur, there was a deliberate attempt to make Holi an ‘inter-communal’
celebration. See ‘Holi or Holocaust’, National Herald, 15 March 1950.
 Religious Minorities in Sindh and UP 233

In some cases, these led to pitched battles,32 with one triggered by alleged
firing from the house of a Muslim League leader.33 In Agra, in early
March, two ‘Muslim visitors’ were reported to be operating ‘in the city
under suspicious circumstances’ and promptly arrested. The action was
closely linked to migration, since ‘The arrests followed inquiry by the
police into the cause of departure of many Muslims to Pakistan during
the last week. It was found that certain persons were moving about in
Muslim localities persuading people to sell all their belongings’.34 Public
meetings in response to communal-related violence in East Pakistan also
revisited some other Partition themes, notably the security of women. Six
female MLAs in UP, including Purnima Bannerji, an honorary director of
Relief and Rehabilitation in the state (women’s section), and Begum Afzaz
Rasool, leader of opposition in the upper chamber, offered their services to
the West Bengal Provincial Congress Committee, so that they could
specifically help women affected by the violence.35
But for many Muslim leaders in UP, it was not just a matter of shoring
up security for their co-religionists in India, but rather these develop-
ments offered an opportunity to articulate a concept of civic rights for
minorities on both sides of the border. To a great extent, as Taylor
Sherman has argued for Hyderabad (Deccan), this was a narrow field
of political expression,36 but one in which some attempt was made to use
the leverage of cross-border minority rights. In Lucknow, over twenty
prominent UP Muslims issued a joint statement suggesting to the Gov-
ernment of Pakistan that the surest way to instil confidence amongst
minorities was to allow them to participate in the administration of the
country. The signatories, who included Chaudhary Haider Hussain, MP,
Iqbal Ahmad, Maulana Bashir Ahmad, Dr. Abdul Hameed and Begum
Habibullah, called on Karachi in the interests of three crore Muslims in
India – almost one-third of whom were to be found in UP – to take
prompt action to ‘stop [communal] incidents’:
The Government of Pakistan and East Bengal profess a tender corner for the
Muslims in the Indian Republic. If there is the least sincerity in these professions
the only way in which they can translate it into practice is to accord impartial

32
The riot in Aligarh led to forty injuries and five deaths and had involved the collection of
two mobs in Sultansarai and Atishbazar for a pitched battle on 4 March. National Herald,
7 March 1950.
33
‘Towns in UP Return to Normal Conditions’, Ibid.
34
‘Pakistan Agents in City?’, National Herald, 4 March 1950.
35
‘UP Women MLAs Offer Services for Relief of East Bengal Refugees’, National Herald, 9
March 1950.
36
Taylor Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India: Negotiating Citizenship in Postcolonial
Hyderabad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 143.
234 ‘Hidden Citizens’ in 1940s and 1950s India and Pakistan

justice to the minorities in their own dominion. They have to be assured not only
of the safety of their life and property but full civic right at a par with the
majority.37

This idea of ‘civic right’ also drew upon a specific historical reading
of Indo-Islamic culture as inherently cross-communal, building on a
typically Nehruvian approach. The Chairman of the District Board in
Saharanpur, K. R. Jamshed Ali Khan, released a public statement, which
‘gave expression to the genuine feelings of ourselves and 70,000 Muslims
of Saharanpur City’. He impressed on the Government of Pakistan ‘in
the name of humility and the noble teachings of Islam, that the inhuman
and deplorable treatment meted out to non-Muslim minorities in
East Bengal and other parts of Pakistan is not only a clear violation of
international justice and laws but is also a disgrace to Islamic history,
character and principles’.38 Likewise, in Jhansi a meeting of about
300 Muslims at the Sipri Bazar Jama Masjid, with the Municipal Com-
missioner Dildar Khan in the chair, passed a resolution condemning the
‘crimes and atrocities’ committed on the minorities in East Bengal.39
Further gatherings took place in big cities across the country,40 and in
many respects – for instance, one held in Lucknow on 19 March –
produced calls for Muslim organizations to play a greater civic role in
the life of the country.41 This meeting, held at Ganga Prasad Memorial
Hall in Lucknow, was initiated by an awareness that – as the veteran
Congress Muslim leader Maulana Hasrat Mohani put it – ‘Muslims
[themselves] should realise that they have as much of a role to play in
moulding the new order as any other community’.42
In the meantime, Indian Federal Minister for Home Affairs Vallabhai
Patel indulged in the usual point scoring with Pakistan, but with a
coercive nod to the idea of Muslim loyalty: if there was a government
masterplan against minorities, he argued in a speech in Lucknow, this
was happening in Pakistan, not in India where police actually fired on
Hindu rioters. In Pakistan by contrast, he claimed, the police stood by
while Hindus were killed; and while in his view the Karachi newspaper

37
‘Pakistan Asked to Be Just to Hindus: Appeal in Interest of Muslims in India’, National
Herald, 4 March 1950.
38
‘East Pakistan Urged to Realise Responsibility towards Minorities’, National Herald, 11
March 1950.
39
‘East Bengal Atrocities Condemned’, National Herald, 13 March 1950.
40
‘Bombay Muslims Appeal’, National Herald, 11 March 1950.
41
‘UP Muslims to Meet in Lucknow’, ibid.
42
The other supporters of and convenors of this 19 March meeting included Abdul Bari,
Abdul Wahhab, Abdul Ghani Ansari, Abdush Shakoor, Muhammad Sami, Z. H. Lari,
Zakir Ali, Muhammad Nazeer, Muhammad Farooq and Mufti Fakhrul Islam. ‘Appeal to
UP Muslims’, National Herald, 15 March 1950.
 Religious Minorities in Sindh and UP 235

Dawn had made too much of the Holi disturbances in UP, for the most
part ‘Muslims of this province are showing support to the India Union’.43
Communal pressures on UP-based Muslims in cities such as Aligarh,
Kanpur and Bareilly triggered a sizeable increase in refugee traffic into
Sindh, crossing the border from Jodhpur, where by May 1950 it was
estimated that an additional 230,000 migrants had arrived.44
The impact of these new arrivals on communal tensions in Sindh was
reflected in an incident that took place in Jacobabad in Upper Sindh also
in May 1950. According to contemporary observers, a fracas started
following an altercation between ‘a few newly-arrived refugees and some
members of the minority community’. Shops were looted and one Hindu
died from his injuries. When the police arrived, they too were attacked by
refugees; the result was a ‘dawn-to-dusk curfew’, and when ‘the barracks
in which the refugees lived were searched, … looted property worth
Rs. 8000 was recovered’. Pakistan Minister for the Interior Khwaja
Shahabuddin together with the Sindh Chief Minister Kazi Fazlullah
travelled to the city with the aim of restoring ‘confidence in the minority
community’, while Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman, president of the Muslim
League, who was touring the province to investigate the ‘refugee
problem’ in the light of wider cross-border developments, called on the
Indian government to ‘organize propaganda to persuade Muslim emi-
grants on their way to West Pakistan to return to their homes in the
United Provinces [UP] and elsewhere’.45 The extent of the awareness of
the wider situation could be seen in Karachi’s Urdu press, which placed a
huge emphasis on the problems of minorities in India, with the plight of
refugees and evacuee problems taking up more than half of the non-
advertising newsprint that month.46
A month earlier, coinciding with or perhaps prompted by these
upsurges in migration across the border from East to West Bengal, and
in knock-on fashion between India and Sindh, Nehru and Liaquat
Ali Khan had met in Delhi in April 1950 to discuss the treatment of
minorities in their respective jurisdictions. This prime ministerial
encounter resulted in the two governments agreeing in very considerable
detail to guarantee the rights of minorities. On the one hand, both
undertook to take steps against individuals or organizations who said or
did anything that could be interpreted as an incitement to war. On the

43
‘Patel’s Rejoinder’, National Herald, 14 March 1950.
44
Sarah Ansari, Life after Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh (Karachi:
Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 127–8.
45
UK High Commissioner, Karachi, to FCO, 9 May 1950, FO371/84241 UKNA.
46
US Despatch 494, 25 May 1950, 890D.411/5-2550 USNA.
236 ‘Hidden Citizens’ in 1940s and 1950s India and Pakistan

other, both conceded the right of people to migrate from one country to
another and that detailed rules should be drawn up concerning the
conditions in which they might move, what property they could take,
how they might dispose of valuables and what instructions needed to be
given to the customs authorities in both countries. These rules, which
would cover the ownership of property of evacuees, included a clause
that gave ‘benefits to those who return to the country which they have left
by the end of [1950], obviously intended as an inducement to those who
[had] left in a panic to think again’.47 In a statement to the Indian
Parliament on 10 April, Nehru ‘placed considerable emphasis on the
assurances received from Liaquat and embodied in the agreement to the
effect that minorities in Pakistan enjoyed full rights of citizenship and that
this would be effectively enforced’.48 Later, the provisions were
expanded to include anyone who had come back on a permanent return
permit before October 1952.
Clearly these unfolding events generated challenges that concerned
Sindh and UP jointly, although in an uneven way. As quid pro quo for
the decision to receive ‘recent migrants’ from UP in accordance with the
Nehru–Liaquat agreement, the Pakistan Government committed itself
to re-accepting 5,000 Hindus who had earlier migrated from Sindh
between February and May 1950. But by mid-1954, the authorities
had only approved twelve families and out of these, only one had actually
returned. In contrast, some 24,000 Muslims had returned from Sindh to
UP by then. Of these, however, over 9,000 were not formally eligible
for repatriation, which immediately placed them in a vulnerable legal
position.49 The UP authorities had been discussing whether and how to
restore property to Muslims who had migrated to Pakistan but later
returned to India. In these circumstances, according to Section 16 of
the Evacuee Property Act they required a certificate from Government of
India, but the state authorities acknowledged that proceedings were likely
to be protracted if all legal formalities were observed. Indeed, because of
the large number of Muslims who were ‘clamouring for restoration

47
UK High Commissioner, Delhi, to UK High Commissioner, Karachi, Telegram, 8 April
1950, FO371/84253 UKNA.
48
UK High Commissioner, Delhi, to UK High Commissioner, Karachi, Telegram,
10 April 1950, FO371/84253 UKNA.
49
P. G. Zachariah, Dep. Secretary to Government to the Secretary to the Government of
Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow, Home Dept. Police (C), 5 July 1954, Procedure to be followed
for restoration of properties left by evacuees which have been declared to be evacuee
properties, Relief and Rehabilitation, File 758/50, Box 36 UP State Archives
(hereafter UPSA).
 Religious Minorities in Sindh and UP 237

ends’,50 UP ministers suggested ‘early restoration’ under Section 49 of

the Act. In the case of Shahjahanpur district, for instance, the local
District Magistrate expressed fears that if poorer Muslim returnees were
unable to reclaim their properties, they might turn to a life of crime.51
But recovering property proved to be a difficult and protracted process.
In April 1955 alone, more than 1,000 applications for the grant of a
certificate were still pending with the various assistant custodians, with
many cases awaiting detailed investigation by the police. Securing the
necessary official certificate required the preparation of an application
which asked for the name, parentage, caste, residence, date of migration,
date of return, permit number and its date, the name of all persons
interested in the property and details of the shares of each, and the facts
on which the claim for restoration was based. By May 1954, the UP
authorities had issued 3,383 certificates, worth c. 25 million rupees, and,
in order to deal with the paperwork generated by the spike in applica-
tions, they had had to appoint three special officers at the level of district
and sessions judge.52
Similar challenges faced minorities when it came to securing govern-
ment employment. It was now especially difficult for Muslims who might
formerly have been members of political organizations such as the
Muslim League or others with vague links to Pakistan, to get a post in
the UP civil services. As state records testify, regular checks were con-
ducted on candidates’ geographical origins, and claims of ‘false name’
used in recruitment, such as when an alleged conspiracy was unearthed
in 1950.53 The fact that information on potentially ‘suspicious’ links of
candidates was collected largely in the localities meant that low-level
power structures could lead to further exclusions.54 Meanwhile in Sindh,

50
V. V. Singh, DM Shahjahanpur to the Custodian, Evacuee Property, UP, Lucknow
3 November 1950, Procedure to be followed for restoration of properties left by evacuees
which have been declared to be evacuee properties, Relief and Rehabilitation, File 758/
50, Box 36 UPSA.
51
Letter of DM of Shahhajanpur to RS Das, 19 February 1951; Procedure to be followed
for restoration of properties left by evacuees which have been declared to be evacuee
properties, Relief and Rehabilitation, File 758/50, Box 36 UPSA.
52
Rup Chandra to R. S. Das, 13 April 1955, Procedure to be followed for restoration of
properties left by evacuees which have been declared to be evacuee properties, Relief and
Rehabilitation, File 758/50, Box 36 UPSA.
53
Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs – 10 August 1950. ‘Possibility of
Muslims Who Opted Finally for Pakistan Joining Service in the Indian Union under
Assumed Names’, ‘Verification of Character and Antecedents of Candidates under State
Employment’ Appointments Box 295, File 1947/321 UPSA.
54
Letter from the Deputy Commissioner Almora to the Chief Secretary to Government
Uttar Pradesh, 27 August 1955. ‘Verification of Character and Antecedents of
Candidates under State Employment’ Appointments Box 295, File 1947/321 UPSA.
238 ‘Hidden Citizens’ in 1940s and 1950s India and Pakistan

the position of non-Muslim government servants highlighted challenges

faced by those who stayed on in Pakistan.
It is clear that there was a symbiotic relationship between the politics of
minority citizens on each side of the border between India and Pakistan.
In India, and especially in areas that were pivotal to the Muslim migra-
tion to Pakistan such as UP, organizations of Muslims had to transform
rapidly from giving support for institutions of communal particularity, to
providing assertions of civic rights as part of a larger national project. In
this, the importance of Islam to the idea of the Indian nation was
repeatedly articulated: in UP’s cities, especially those with a historic
connection to Indo-Islamic culture in the north such as Lucknow,
Muslims described themselves as pivotal to Indian identity and civic
values. It was significant that such declarations took place largely at times
of inter-ethnic conflict, when the ‘symmetry’ of minority politics on each
side of the border seemed to justify specific expressions of popular
support for citizenship rights. On the whole, however, the events of the
first five years following Independence did little to counteract Muslim
feelings of insecurity in UP. As Chapters 2 and 3 have already shown,
tenure in government service could be vulnerable, and touring Congress-
men found ‘an all pervading sense of fear’ among Muslims as a whole.55
In Sindh, there may have been relatively fewer specific non-Muslim
claims articulated with respect to civic rights (certainly as compared with
issues being raised by the representatives of Bengali Hindus in the
Pakistan Constituent Assembly debates during this period); yet the press
there still formed part of the larger cross-border discourse about the
related lives of minorities on each side of the border. As the 1950s
progressed, the number of Sindhi Hindus who left for good increased,
with knock-on effects as far as the province’s non-Muslim presence and
profile was concerned. Those with business interests moved on, either to
India where they settled in places such as UP or Bombay, or, alterna-
tively, they departed for other parts of the world to become a permanent
part of the long-established global diaspora of Sindhi merchant firms.56
And while non-Muslims had continued to hold government posts in the
province in the immediate years following Partition, this situation
changed in relation to both pull and push factors. By the 1950s, their
growing marginalization was reflected in the calculations of the Sindh

55
This was the sense of Mohanlal Gautam in May 1950, as cited in Mushirul Hasan,
Legacy of a Divided Nation: India’s Muslims from Independence to Ayodhya (London:
Routledge, 1997), p. 180.
56
Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants 1750–1947: Traders of Sind from
Bukhara to Panama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
 Dalit, Tribal and Hari Rights 239

Government when it published how it was to draw up seniority lists

within the provincial civil service bureaucracy: any Hindu incumbents
of government posts, it announced, were to be ‘taken into consideration,
confirmed, and then weeded out’.57

Dalit, Tribal and Hari Rights

Just as citizenship in India and Pakistan was, from the outset, seen as
exclusionary and limited around religious minorities, other communities
also sought to establish their relationship to each state, as ‘marked’
citizens. Dalits, adivasis, ‘denotified’ (ex-Criminal) tribes in India and
haris (share-cropper peasants) in Pakistan balanced their demands to
rights via existing frameworks of universal rights, with claims for special
recognition. Traditionally, historians of citizenship have tended to
explore the claims of such communities in terms of ‘group-differentiated’
rights within citizenship paradigms.58 In this section, we explore the
tension between claims asserted on the basis of group identities with
others articulated in terms of broader unmarked constitutional rights.
Most importantly there were sometimes contradictions between the
formal lobbying organizations and the activities of local grassroots
movements, particularly in cities on each side of the border, and this
could encourage such organizations to work outside traditional para-
digms of civic rights. In the case of India, our argument operates along-
side those of Ramnarayan Rawat that challenge previous assumptions
about the assimilation of Dalit politics into the party politics of the
Congress in the late 1940s.59 In some cases, the spatial aspects of these
groups’ claims created problems for the assertion or rights, over and
above the issue of social marginalization, not least because of the
higher-level politics of tension between India and Pakistan.

57
Sindh Government Gazette, 24 March 1955 (Karachi: Sindh Govt. Press, 1955), p. 206.
For a fuller picture of the process of migration experienced by Sindhi Hindus, see
Nandita Bhavnani, The Making of Exile: Sindhi Hindus and the Partition of India (New
Delhi: Westland Tranquebar, 2014); Rita Kothari, The Burden of Refuge: The Sindhi
Hindus of Gujarat (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007); and Subhadra Anand, National
Integration of Sindhis (New Delhi: Vikas, 1996). For more personal recollections, see the
oral testimonies collected in Saaz Aggarwal, Sindh: Stories from a Vanished Homeland
(Pune: Black-and-White Fountain, 2012).
58
For instance, see Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
59
Ramnarayan Rawat, ‘Partition Politics and Achuut Identity: A Study of the Scheduled
Castes Federation and Dalit Politics in UP, 1946–1948’, in The Partitions of Memory: The
Afterlife of the Division of India, ed. S. Kaul (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001),
pp. 111–39.
240 ‘Hidden Citizens’ in 1940s and 1950s India and Pakistan

By the early 1950s, there was an established framework in UP, as in

other states, for recognizing the rights of Scheduled Castes to govern-
ment employment. This, of course, had its colonial antecedents in the
struggles led by Ambedkar for statutory recognition of the separate
political rights of ‘Untouchables’ or ‘Depressed Classes’ (to use the
language of the interwar years). There were significant limitations to
the implementation of these structures of representation in the services,
which reflected what Jesus Chairez-Garza has described as a structural
high-caste dominance in late 1940s Indian politics.60 Overall, the UP
government had a statutory requirement to reserve 10 per cent of all
posts for Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SC/STs), although this was
increased to 18 per cent in September 1952.61 But, when exploring the
various means by which these communities asserted their civic rights in
the period under scrutiny, it is important to note that formal, state-driven
measures had very little effect in bringing scheduled castes (SCs) into
state employment. National debates on the failure to enhance recruit-
ment among SC/STs in the early 1950s noted that a large proportion of
posts were filled by promotion rather than appointment. Although com-
munities themselves could prove that some members were well qualified,
they were relatively unsuccessful in civil services entry tests. The Com-
missioner for Scheduled Castes argued that a separate exam should be
prepared, but the Government of India opposed such an idea, drawing
on Article 335 of the Constitution that argued that provisions for SC/STs
should be consistent with the maintenance of the efficiency of adminis-
tration.62 Indeed, the UP government acknowledged in 1953 that its
record in filling quotas in government service had been ‘very poor’.
Effectively, the system simply reinforced the predominance of low-status
communities in the most menial government jobs. Divided into formal
‘classes’, there was a concentration of SC/ST representation in the
bottom Class IV category, which included unskilled and irregular day
rate workers. In fact, permanent security of employment at this level was
not established until the early 1990s, via the efforts of the UP Class IV
Employees Association.63 In the 1950s, their situation was precarious, a

60
Jesus Francisco Chairez-Garza, ‘“Bound Hand and Foot and Handed over to the Caste
Hindus”: Ambedkar, Untouchability and the Politics of Partition’, The Indian Economic
& Social History Review 55, 1 (2018), pp. 1–28.
61
G.O. no. 2328/II-B 104 1952 dated 22 September 1953, Irrigation Department, Box 11,
File 333/1952 UPSA.
62
‘Debate on the Report of the Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes
for the Years 1952 and 1953’, Home, CS (A), 67/54-CS (A) NAI.
63
State of UP v. Class IV Employees Association, Laws (All) 1993-9-7, High Court of
Allahabad, Judgement. See www.the-laws.com/Encyclopedia/Browse/Case?CaseId=
303991165000 (accessed December 2018).
 Dalit, Tribal and Hari Rights 241

problem compounded by a total absence of higher-level bureaucratic

representation. For instance, in the state’s Irrigation Department in 1953,
there were no SC appointees in Classes I and II, only 5 in Class III
(1.5 per cent) and 107 in Class IV (12.25 per cent). In most departments
of the state, there were between 5 and 9 per cent recruitment of SC/STs to
Class IV posts, and usually around 0.5–1.5 per cent in Class III.64
From the 1940s, the UP authorities had attempted to guide bureau-
cratic recruitment with reference to what were, in that decade, described
as ‘Depressed Class’ organizations. But it did so with some reluctance
since there was a fear that reference to one organization would only lead
to a number of other – competing – groups to come forward. For
instance, in 1942, when discussing the disbursement of grants from the
‘reclamation department’ for low castes, the UP Adi Hindu Depressed
Classes Association submitted a petition calling for a body to advise on
grants.65 While it was pointed out that there were already two such
associations in the province, the advisory board was eventually agreed.
But through 1943–4, the Pasi Mahasabha and the District Jatava
Conference both sent further representations to government, claiming
that their interests of their specific caste groups were not being met.66
Additional efforts were made from early 1952 to increase the quota of
SCs and STs applying for government posts, which involved identifying
organizations and newspapers, and raising the upper age limit for appli-
cants from twenty-eight to thirty-one.67 This was, however, mediated
through specific provincial-level associations – specifically, the All-India
Harijan Sevak Sangh, the Scheduled Castes Welfare Association, the UP
branch of the All-India Scheduled Castes Federation, based in Parmat
Kanpur, under the presidentship of Tilak Chand Kuril, and finally, the
UP branch of the Depressed Classes League, based in Lucknow and led
by Ramanand Shastri.68 Clearly, these lobbying groups had little

64
‘Statement Showing Number and Percentage of Scheduled Castes Employees in Various
Departments of Uttar Pradesh Government’, in ‘Annual Reports – Commissioner for
Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes’, Irrigation (Establishments) Box 13, File 338-
B/1952 UPSA.
65
‘Special Meeting of the Executive Committee of the UP Adi Hindu Depressed Classes
Association held on 27 June 1942’, in Memorial of the Adi Hindu Depressed Classes
Association. Harijan Sahayak, Box 4, File 1942/113 UPSA.
66
‘Representation from the District Jatava Conference, Meerut, 2/3 June 1944’, in
Memorial of the Adi Hindu Depressed Classes Association. Harijan Sahayak, Box 4,
File 1942/113 UPSA.
67
‘Representation of Scheduled Castes in Public Services’, Appointment (B) Box 28, File
159/1952 UPSA.
68
H. K. Tandon to All Heads of Department, 24 February 1954 in ‘Representations of
Members of the Scheduled Castes in Services’, Irrigation Department, Box 11, File 333/
1952 UPSA.
242 ‘Hidden Citizens’ in 1940s and 1950s India and Pakistan

practical effect in influencing the outcomes of government recruitment.

Their function was formally limited to that of recommendation alone,
and providing advice to applicants. Given (according to one Commis-
sioner of Scheduled Castes) the lack of enthusiasm, even apathy, both
within departments and among high-ranking officers to fill up quotas,
their impact was minor.69
The legal rights of low-caste communities were also not so easily
served from among their own communities, with very difficult recruit-
ment into judicial services and the legal profession. One SC vakil (legal
representative), Puran Chand, argued that the existing rule of three full
years’ service made it very difficult for SC candidates:
Knowing the scheduled caste lawyers in UP it can safely be said that no
Scheduled Caste candidate can come within the four corners of these
conditions … I am probably the only Scheduled Caste candidate who has put
in three years of actual practice at the Bar, but I would be exceeding the specified
maximum age-limit by 1 year 5 months and 7 days.70
The corollary of this was that community organizations had to find
alternative means to assert citizenship rights, via channels of political
power and influence. Shortly after Independence, it was still difficult to
directly lobby for one’s community using the influence of a political party
within the civil bureaucracy itself. Any individual engaged in what was
officially defined as ‘subversive activities’ was banned from applying for
posts,71 yet in the mid-1950s the UP government admitted that in the
area of bureaucratic appointments, influence was in any case wielded
much more effectively via bribes.72
In a few cases, however, community organizations represented their
rights very clearly through a connection of community activism and
petitioning, sometimes around state-run industrial enterprises. In the
first years following Independence, the Pasi Sammelan represented its
demands for greater bureaucratic representation in the UP in regular
meetings, featuring high-level Congress leaders.73 These groups often
worked through existing industrial policies of government too. The Uttar
Pradesh Sanyukt Kori Mahasangh, for instance, held a mass meeting of
community members at the Achutanand Park in Kanpur in late

69
L. M. Shrikant, Extract from Hindustan Standard, 1 August 1952, in ‘Representation of
Scheduled Castes in Public Services’, Appointment (B) Box 28, File 159/1952 UPSA.
70
Puran Chand, Vakil, Collectorate Agra, to Premier UP Gov, 25/8/52 in ‘Representation
of Scheduled Castes in Public Services’, Appointment (B) Box 28, File 159/1952 UPSA.
71
‘Verification of Character and Antecedents of Candidates under State Employment’,
Appointments Box 295, File 1947/321 UPSA.
72
Note of 17 November 1956, ibid.
73
‘Kamishanari Paasi-Sammelan’, Aaj, 6 January 1948.
 Dalit, Tribal and Hari Rights 243

December 1953, which resulted in a number of resolutions and pro-

posals to the UP government, eventually produced an ornately printed
petition. Its contents included the insistence that only the Sanyukt Kori
Mahasangh could represent the community and that all other approaches
to government should be seen as ‘individual’; that the Kori community
should be included on a recent government order recommending bene-
fits to denotified communities; and that rural industrial help and land
should be provided for weaker or more vulnerable sections of the com-
munity. Most importantly, the petition set out its opposition to the UP
Weaver’s Cooperative Association, which the petition recommended to
be replaced by a body representing handloom weavers. The petition also
opposed the actions of district industrial stores, which, it argued, were
working in the interests of other communities.74 These claims for indus-
trial advancement were placed alongside an appeal for greater political
representation too, which, the Kori representatives maintained, were
overshadowed by other communities. The ‘low’ status of Koris meant
that they were not fully represented in the Vidhan Sabha.75
This gulf between the language of rights and their quotidian imple-
mentation was illustrated in the case of forced labour and its prevention.
It was still the case in the few years after Independence that begar (forced
labour) was routinely extracted from Dalit communities. In fact, the UP
government issued a ‘complaint form’ to be circulated to all district
magistrates in 1947, which was to be used to record particular cases of
official use of ‘free’ labour. Information that came back found that in
many areas of the state begar continued to exist, but that its conditions
could be quite ambiguous.76 Article 23(1) of the Indian Constitution
forbade forced labour except in the cases covered by Article 23(2) and
made contravention an offence, punishable under Section 374 of the
Indian Penal Code. But the communication of this framework was very
difficult. In a circular entitled the ‘Abolition of Forced Labour’, the
Ministry of Labour pointed out that
Reports received from some state governments show that the action taken by
them to give publicity to constitutional and legal provisions in regard to forced
labour has been restricted mainly to their publication in the English newspapers,
etc., or Press Bulletins. These are rarely read by villagers most of whom are
illiterate. I am to suggest that in so far as rural areas are concerned, [as well as the]

74
Petition of the Kori Mahasabha, Kanpur, 27 December 1953, AICC Collection, PB 19
(1), Uttar Pradesh 1953 NMML.
75
‘UP Handloom Weavers’ Congress, Head Office Hathras’, 31 December 1953, AICC
Collection, PB 19 (1), Uttar Pradesh 1953 NMML.
76
Complaint from all DMS UP reg. Begar, Harijan Sahayak Department, Box 8 and 9,
File 175/48 UPSA.
244 ‘Hidden Citizens’ in 1940s and 1950s India and Pakistan

distribution of leaflets in local languages, publicity may be given through local

officials of the Revenue Department and District Public Relations Officers. It is
further requested that the State Government may kindly consider giving publicity
through the All-India Radio.77
In many cases, however, there was a dichotomy between organizations
set up as official representatives of collective community groups, and the
more grassroots manifestations of these same people. This was evident as
far as rights movements of ex-Criminal Tribes – collectively funded in a
number of welfare schemes in North India in the 1950s via the Vimukt
Jati Sevak Sangh (VJSS) – were concerned. First, MPs complained in the
mid-1950s that the distribution of welfare resources to the VJSS in Delhi
was completely out of proportion to UP as a whole: there were fewer than
2,000 members of these communities in the city, compared to two
million in UP, yet around 10 per cent of the funding was directed
towards Delhi.78 This imbalance was clearly supported by government’s
own admission that very little progress to date had been made on
‘rehabilitation’ programmes for ex-Criminal Tribes in the state. There
were six settlements in UP which as late as the spring of 1950 were still
pondering the implementation of the Criminal Tribes Enquiry Commit-
tee Report, in terms of how their day-to-day management should be
decided.79
Second, and more troubling were accusations of the ill-treatment of
community members, and embezzlement by the VJSS – an offshoot of
the Servants of the People Society, and therefore, not an organization
actually grounded in the politics of the groups involved. While officially
headed by Algu Rai Shastri, P. D. Tandon and Rameshwari Nehru, most
of the work of the VJSS was carried out by officers, such as the VJSS
Secretary Bhagwat Singh. A grant of Rs. 88,000 had been dispersed to
the organization to build a number of houses in Shahdara and Sansi
Colony for ex-Criminal Tribes. The community to be housed, according
the VJSS’s own correspondence with the Government of India, were
people who had been living in New Delhi railway station or at the
Swatantra Mills. However, community members alleged that Bhagwat

77
Copy of letter no. PL-17(49) dated December 24, 1951, from the Deputy Secretary to
the Government of India, Ministry of Labour, New Delhi to All State Governments.
Subject ‘Abolition of Forced Labour’, Increase in the number of carts and so on used by
SDOs, Revenue B, Box 101, File 103B/1947 UPSA.
78
L. M. Shrikant, Commissioner, 2.10.54, in Grant-in-aid for the Welfare of Ex-Criminal
Tribes for the Year 1954–5 to the Vimukta Jati Sevak Sangh, New Delhi, MHA, Public-
II, File no. 51/4/54-Public II NAI.
79
‘Condition of Criminal Tribes in UP, Minister Admits Govt’s Failure to Do Much.
Prohibition to Be Enforced Gradually’, National Herald, 16 March 1950.
 Dalit, Tribal and Hari Rights 245

Singh and other members of the VJSS management had misappropriated

some of the funding, by working with a particular contractor in the city.
In effect, the contractor, or so it was alleged, had used poor materials and
had divided the unspent funds with the VJSS management.80
A representative of the ex-Criminal Tribes wrote a long list of grievances,
which included the use of loans as ‘bribes’ and misappropriation of
funds.81 Later, in 1955, the accusations extended to the keeping of ‘girls
for dancing’.82
Important here was the use of labour-specific organizational methods.
Members of ex-Criminal Tribes represented themselves to the govern-
ment via the Kasturba Nagar Co-Operative Multipurpose Society. In
their petitions and appeals, they made free use of the same paradigms
of citizenship rights seen in earlier years in the mainstream press. The
Co-Operative representatives writing to the Home Minister in
1955 stated that they had ‘listened to [his] speech and saw a flame of
hope and success in it that we were also going to be counted among the
free cityzens [sic] of free India after a slavery of countless years’.83 In later
letters, a similar sense of injustice and disempowerment in relation to
educated elites characterized their correspondence with government
officials:
Shri Purushottam Das Tandon, Mata Rameshwari Nehru and Shri Sewak Ram
cannot work among us. They travel in cars. They think us slaves and the worst
persons on the earth. They hate our children. They find bad smells in our small
houses. They know to work out plans on papers and get money from the
Government on our name and fill up their bellies.84
In much of the communication from this organization, Rameshwari
Nehru was referred to as ‘Mataji’ – a woman whose main task was to
protect the interests of the social workers of the VJSS.
The idea that ex-Criminal Tribes faced specific problems in the early
postcolonial period, in the context of limited rehabilitation policies, or
the continuation of older policing cultures, extended into UP. In a State

80
Jojinder Singh to K. N. Katju, 8 October 1954, Grant-in-aid for the Welfare of Ex-
Criminal Tribes for the Year 1954–5 to the Vimukta Jati Sevak Sangh, New Delhi,
MHA, Public-II, File no. 51/4/54-Public II NAI.
81
‘Black Deeds of Office Bearers VJSS’, 26 February 1955 in Grant-in-aid for the Welfare
of Ex-Criminal Tribes for the Year 1954–5 to the Vimukta Jati Sevak Sangh, New Delhi,
MHA, Public-II, File no. 51/4/54-Public II NAI.
82
To SHO, 31 January 1955, ibid.
83
Letter from Jojinder Singh, Secretary to the Kasturba Nagar Co-operative Multipurpose
Society Ltd, to Kailash Nath Katju, 25 November 1954, Grant-in-aid for the Welfare of
Ex-Criminal Tribes for the Year 1954–5 to the Vimukta Jati Sevak Sangh, New Delhi,
MHA, Public-II, File no. 51/4/54-Public II NAI.
84
Ram Chander et al. to Home Minister, 27 January 1955, ibid.
246 ‘Hidden Citizens’ in 1940s and 1950s India and Pakistan

Assembly debate on the issue, Bhagwati Prasad Shukla discussed the

alleged harassment of ex-Criminal Tribes by the police on the basis of
reports that had been received, and suggested that the police should no
longer be concerning themselves with implementing the Criminal Tribes
Act. Chet Ram (Congress) claimed that ‘backward classes’ who could
not assert themselves had been declared ‘Criminal Tribes’ and were now
used as scapegoats for real miscreants. For him, the people of higher
castes were more criminally-minded than the criminal tribes; freedom
had been attained but not for the so-called Criminal Tribes.85
In a number of important cases in North India, the failures of state
mechanisms to protect the rights of marginalized communities, and the
superficiality of reform or rehabilitation programmes, encouraged lobby-
ing groups to forego the normal mechanisms of civic organizations.
Instead, in the lead up to the first general elections, Dalit, adivasi or
denotified tribe bodies sought forms of political representation to further
their specific rights. This was something that linked back strongly not
only to the politics of the Scheduled Caste Federation (SCF) in the
1940s but also to smaller-level civic groups who attempted to get tickets,
as ‘Dalits’, in Congress-dominated constituencies.86 In the lead-up to
the 1952 general elections in UP, a range of SC meetings in the state
decided that the SCF should contest all SC seats, and some general ones,
while reiterating faith in the leadership of Ambedkar. Many of these
political meetings, however, were also cognisant of the connections
between political representation and bureaucratic power: one such SCF
meeting in Lucknow condemned the policy of the city’s rationing author-
ities when it came to ‘discriminating’ between the federation and other
political parties over the issue of ration permits around conferences.87
Across the border in Sindh, the position of SC communities and so-
called criminal tribes is less easy to track in official archives as compared
with developments in UP during this period. This is a great extent due to
the twice-marginalized position of such groups which means that they
seem to have been largely hidden from the historical record for the period
following the creation of Pakistan. Not only were Sindh’s Dalits
members of a minority within Pakistan as a whole but they were also
far smaller in size than East Pakistan’s non-Muslim population, and
hence for the late 1940s and 1950s, it was their counterparts in East

85
‘National Herald, 16 March 1950.
86
For an instance of this process taking place in Western India during the same timeframe,
see William Gould, Sarah Gandee and Chhara Dakxin, ‘Settling the Citizen, Settling the
Nomad: “Habitual Offenders”, Rebellion and Civic Consciousness in Western India,
1938–1952’, Modern Asian Studies, 2019, http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/144745/.
87
National Herald, 11 September 1951.
 Dalit, Tribal and Hari Rights 247

Pakistan who have left more visible archival traces. As discussed earlier in
this chapter, it was Sindh’s urban, higher caste Hindus whose experi-
ences following Partition are easier to track. By May 1948, the number of
Sindhi Hindus remaining in the province was down to around 300,000 as
compared with c. 1.5 million a year earlier. About half of these, contem-
poraries expected, were likely to stay on in Sindh. For some, this was
because they possessed valuable property in the mofussil that was unlikely
to be sold except at a loss, but most of them were poor and so could not
hope for a better life elsewhere. The latter included Scheduled Castes,
who were not expected to ‘migrate as long as the embargo on the export
of their cattle is not lifted, and who [anyway were] not assured of home
and means of livelihood in India’.88
How Sindh’s Scheduled Castes themselves regarded the new post-
Independence political arrangements therefore remains to be explored,
though in more recent decades, as our Epilogue will highlight, levels of
activism increased substantially among groups such as the province’s
Kohli community. The emphasis in contemporary records is on devel-
opments in East Pakistan, where its provincial assembly’s non-Muslim
seats were officially divided between Caste Hindus, Scheduled Castes
and Christian representatives. It is worth noting, however, that the
second Pakistan Constituent Assembly deferred a decision on whether
or not to opt for joint or separate electorates for minorities, transferring
the matter to the provincial level to decide. The new West Pakistan
Assembly, established following the introduction of One Unit in 1955,
contained ten seats for non-Muslims but these were not subdivided or
allocated to particular groups. According to Keith Callard, in debates on
the issue in August 1956,
the only speakers against the motion were one Hindu, one independent member
and the leaders of the Sind Awami Mahaz (G.M. Syed and Pir Ilahi Bakhsh).
After four days of debates the matter was put to the vote, and the resolution in
favour of separate electorates was carried by 129 to 10 … Since the total
membership of the Assembly was 310, a large proportion of MLAs either
abstained or thought it prudent not to attend the session.89
As far as the so-called Criminal Tribes were concerned, there was one
group in Sindh that had acquired notoriety during the war years, whose
members did not have a SC identity, but who surfaced periodically as a
subject of major concern immediately following Independence. These

88
Fortnightly Report for the period 15–31 May 1948, 8 June 1948, MEA/2-1, 48 – Pak
I (Vol. I) NAI.
89
Keith Callard, Pakistan: A Political Study (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957),
pp. 250–1, citing Dawn, 7 August 1956.
248 ‘Hidden Citizens’ in 1940s and 1950s India and Pakistan

were the Hurs, Muslim followers of an extremely influential local spirit-

ual leader, the Pir Pagaro. Their activities during the war years – vari-
ously described as an ‘uprising’ or as a breakdown in law and order – had
resulted in martial law being imposed on the province (1942–3), the
detention of Hur families in guarded settlements (lorhas) and even the
execution of Pir Sibghatullah Shah II (in March 1943) on the charge of
waging war against the Crown.90 Throughout the late 1940s and early
1950s, the authorities in the province continued to deal with the fallout
from this challenge, in the shape of gang members who were evading
capture and around 12,000 Hurs still living in concentration-style
camps. In May 1948, during discussions on how to check the smuggling
problem, the Sindh chief minister highlighted the need to curb Hur
activities in view of their recent lawlessness, and he blamed the continu-
ing Hur ‘menace’ on ‘a regular pernicious anti-Pakistan programme’ by
‘interested persons’ who were largely responsible for ‘vindictive Hur
attacks on peaceful Pakistanis in Hur areas’.91 The Sindh authorities
decided to take up the matter with the Indian authorities, as ‘Hur raiders
[had] found sanctuary in the border Rajputana states following their
release from Sind jails and [had been] making frequent incursions’ into
the province from these strongholds.92
In December 1951, in an attempt to exert pressure from above, the
authorities decided to restore the gaddi (ancestral seat) to the eldest son
of the previous incumbent.93 The new sajjada nashin, Pir Shah Mardan
Shah II,94 promptly advised his Hur followers to abide by the law, calling
upon them to behave in a manner that would bring credit to him and the
shrine of his forbears. In the process, he expressed his gratitude to the
Sindh government, as well as the Government of Pakistan, for their
‘generous gesture’, and he was, he assured them, ‘deeply mindful of his
duty by the State’.95 Following the Pir’s installation ceremony, which was
attended by ‘thousands of Hurs including some from Bharati [Indian]

90
For a detailed account of the origins of the Hurs and their activities in Sindh during the
British period, see Sarah Ansari, Sufi Saints and State Power: The Pirs of Sind, 1843–1947
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chapters 3 and 6.
91 92
Dawn, 21 May 1948. Ibid.
93
‘Pir Pagaro’s Gaddi to Be Restored to Eldest son’, Dawn, 10 December 1951, p. 10.
94
The new Pir, who had been sent for education to England by the authorities when his
father was executed, was influential in the early years of Pakistan’s cricket development
in the 1950s. Before Pakistan’s first tour of England in 1954 he had a grass pitch
constructed in his garden so that the Pakistan players, who had to play most of their
cricket at the time on matting pitches, could practise in something similar to English
conditions. He re-founded the Sindh Cricket Association, captained Sindh in the first-
ever match in the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy in November 1953 and captained a team under
his name against the MCC in 1955–6.
95
Dawn, 14 December 1951, p. 5.
 Dalit, Tribal and Hari Rights 249

territory’, it was acknowledged that the authorities had given [him] an

opportunity ‘to wean away his turbulent sect from a life of crime and
lawlessness so that they [might] take their due place in the life of the
country as loyal and law-abiding citizens’.96
Later in 1952, while the new Pir was attempting to persuade remaining
Hur outlaws to lay down their arms,97 the Sind Settlement Committee,
which had been appointed by the Sindh authorities in 1950, issued a
series of policy recommendations towards ‘Criminal Tribes’ in general,
but particularly in relation to the Hurs. These included the abolition of
Hur-guarded camps, with Hurs instead settled as far as possible in their
original homes where ‘free colonies’ would be built for their speedy
resettlement. The Committee further proposed that primary education
for Hur children be made free and compulsory, and that secondary
education scholarships be granted to Hur boys ‘to serve as an incentive
and turn their mind away from crime and fanaticism’. It also advised that
the employment of Hurs should be encouraged by government and semi-
government departments, a move that it hoped would ‘bring back the lost
faith among the Hurs’. As the report recognized, many Hurs had always
possessed a nomadic lifestyle, and a large number had also been externed
from Sindh thanks to what had happened during the period of martial
law. In response, the authorities were urged to grant Hurs ‘citizenship
rights’ and allot lands to them in various parts of the province.98 Hur
prisoners being held in Khairpur State99 were released in June 1952,
following meetings between the State’s chief minister and the Pir, who
had assured the Khairpur authorities that Hurs would ‘not indulge in
any anti-State activities and would behave as peaceful and law abiding
citizens’.100 By January 1953, news made the front page of Dawn that the
last of the Hur outlaws to defy the Pir’s orders had surrendered to the
authorities. Muhammad Ali Narejo, who despite a prize on his head of
nearly Rs. 10,000 had evaded capture for the previous seven years, was
alleged to have been responsible for many murders and dacoities
in Nawabshah and Tharparkar.101 Land, however, remained a key
challenge in Hur rehabilitation and absorption within mainstream
society. As the Pir himself repeatedly pointed out in the early 1950s,

96
At the time of the Pir’s installation, official estimates put the Hur following at
c. 1,500,000 persons in Pakistan and about 750,000 in India. Dawn, 5 February 1952.
97 98
Dawn, 8 May 1952. Dawn, 30 May 1952.
99
This princely state formally acceded to the Dominion of Pakistan in October 1947, and
was later merged into West Pakistan as part of the One Unit amalgamation process in
October 1955.
100 101
Dawn, 13 June 1952. Dawn, 26 January 1953.
250 ‘Hidden Citizens’ in 1940s and 1950s India and Pakistan

several thousand Hurs were leading lives without shelter or means of

subsistence; the Pakistan Government had done nothing to return lands –
over 100,000 acres confiscated by the British – to their rightful
owners.102 In his view, anti-Hur prejudice had not died away completely,
and it eventually took until the 1960s for their rehabilitation to be
recognized, helped by the active involvement of Hurs who took part in
the brief war fought across the Sindh-India border in 1965.103
Land rights also proved central to another marginalized group in
Sindh, its haris (‘wielders of the plough’, sharecropping peasants).
A report produced by US embassy officials in the late 1950s pointed
out that the social status of local Christians had declined thanks to the
readiness of Punjabi Christian cultivators to take up sweepers’ work in
Sindhi cities and towns such as Hyderabad, Nawabshah and Sanghar:
‘Christian cultivators [it was claimed] appeared to accept social inferior-
ity and to conduct themselves as if the Muslims were a superior caste’.
Indeed, this sense of inferiority, or so missionaries stationed in Sindh
believed, was also proving a handicap to the work of the Sind Hari
Committee and its leader Hyder Bakhsh Jatoi.104 The Sind Hari Com-
mittee, which represented hari interests and dated back to the 1930s, led
campaigns throughout the late 1940s and 1950s to improve the lot of
landless agricultural workers in the province, and discussion about hari
rights and the abolition of the prevailing zamindar system gripped the

102
Dawn, 26 August 1952.
103
Dawn, 8 July 1952. During the 1965 war between India and Pakistan, about 65,000
Hurs served in various fronts especially that of Sindh. While the Southern desert sector
was a mere sideshow to the major battles fought in the Punjab and in Kashmir, the
Indians had placed two divisions there with the aim of tying down Pakistani troops.
Facing a shortage of troops and unable to divert any substantial forces from the Punjab
and Kashmir sectors (from where the main Indian thrust had come), the commander of
the Pakistan Rangers, Brigadier Khuda Dad Khan, turned to local help. Hurs
apparently volunteered in droves. Given only basic training and light weapons, they
fought alongside Rangers and regular army units, using their knowledge of the desert to
help blunt the Indian offensive. But perhaps their most famous (and militarily
important) action was the capture, though only briefly, of the Indian fort of
Kishangarh, located several kilometres inside India. See https://defence.pk/pdf/
threads/history-of-the-hurs-sindh.491945/ (accessed December 2018).
104
‘Trip to Sind Area in Pakistan, April 1013, 1958’, Despatch 983, 25 April 1958,
890D.413/4-2558 USNA. Jatoi towards the end of the Second World War had
resigned as Deputy Collector in Sindh’s provincial service in order to be able to
champion the rights of Sindh’s landless peasantry. While exact figures are not
available, the number of members of the Sind Hari Committee are estimated to have
ranged from 10,000 to 12,000 in 1947–8, reaching a peak at 15,000–16,000 in 1954–5.
See Mahmood Hasan Khan, ‘Sind Hari Committee, 1930–1970: A Peasant
Movement?’, World Employment Programme Research Working Paper (Geneva:
International Labour Organisation, 1979), pp. 20–1.
 Dalit, Tribal and Hari Rights 251

province periodically during this period.105 When (a different) ‘Hari

Committee of Enquiry’, which had been tasked in early 1947 with inves-
tigating possible ways of reforming tenancy arrangements in the Sindhi
countryside, recommended against the abolition of the zamindar system
and the grant of full tenancy rights to the peasants in May 1948, a storm
of protest ensued. For some contemporaries, the Committee of
Enquiry’s findings turned too much of a blind eye to the local imbalance
of agrarian power, and thus ignored the rights of those in Sindh actually
working the land.106
The Committee’s Majority Report, which drew attention to the huge
inequalities present in the Sindhi countryside, as well as the liabilities that
flowed from this, did not lack sympathy for the haris’ plight. By the late
1940s, haris made up more than 50 per cent of the province’s total rural
population of c. 3.6 million. As the report explained, not only did they
pay half the produce of their efforts over to their zamindar but landlords
typically deducted various levies (abwabs), which inevitably reduced the
haris’ share of any profit. And payment for guarding crops before har-
vesting, for weighing crops after they had been harvested, for lighting
when the irrigation of crops took place at night and so on, were all paid
for by haris who also had to provide bullocks and buy seeds. As tenants-
at-will who could be dismissed at any time, this vulnerability was made
still more precarious by the fact that since most contracts were oral they
had no recourse to the law in the event of a dispute: as one contemporary
put it, ‘Government officials are beyond [the hari’s] reach, his landlord is
the final arbiter of his fate’.107 Furthermore, as the report continued:
Inwardly they [the haris] deplore the heavy extraction from their share of crops,
the heavy infantile mortality, and the incidence of disease in their families, the
loss of their bullocks by theft/disease, the shortage of essential domestic/
consumer goods, their own illiteracy and lack of education, the heavy demands
of social customs on their hard-earned incomes, and various other disabilities
which are their present lot. Having no collective voice, they stoically endure these
hardships imposed by the prevailing socio-economic system.108

105
The origins of the Sind Hari Committee dated back to the 1920s and the formation of a
‘Kisan Bureau’, whose slogan was ‘Hari hagdaar’ (‘the hari deserves his rights’). The
Bureau later turned into the Sind Hari Association, which in turn became the Sind Hari
Committee in 1936. It mobilized mass protests across Sindh against the 1939 Bombay
Tenancy Act that was adopted by the newly separated province, including a massive
rally in Hyderabad in 1943, which helped to kick-start the investigations that resulted in
the 1947–8 Hari Committee of Enquiry.
106
UK Opdom 38, 6–12 May 1948, 12 May 1948, IOR L/PO/12/14 BL.
107
Civil and Military Gazette, 10 June 1949.
108
Report of the Government Hari Enquiry Committee 1947–48, Roger Thomas Papers,
Mss Eur F235/282 BL.
252 ‘Hidden Citizens’ in 1940s and 1950s India and Pakistan

Under these circumstances, it was surprising to sympathetic contem-

poraries that, having drawn so dismal a picture of conditions in rural
Sindh, the Committee did not recommend reforms that critics believed
would substantially improve the rights of people living and working
there. Rather, it seemed to be saying that the problems of haris were
either of their own creation or natural problems or government neglect,
that zamindar was a friend of the hari, and consequently that land
reforms were not just undesirable but represented a loss for the hari.
One member of the committee, however, disagreed with the majority
opinion. Muhammad Masud, a serving district officer (Collector of
Nawabshah, who had won plaudits for his hari uplift work before Inde-
pendence), stuck to his guns.109 He refused to add his name to the final
report, choosing instead to produce a ‘Note of Dissent’, as had originally
been permitted, which was also presented to the authorities in July 1948.
What Masud did not expect was for his opposition to be kept from
the public.110 In the words of British observers, ‘the suppression by
the Government of the minority report by one member of the Committee
appointed to examine the agrarian question has attracted much atten-
tion’.111 Even Dawn (which had little affection for the provincial author-
ities) commented approvingly on his stance:

109
Muhammad Masud (1916–5), and later known as ‘Masud Khaddarposh’ and ‘Masud
Hari’, was born in 1916 in Lahore; son of Dr. Ghulam Jilani, a hakeem and personal
physician to the Shah of Iran, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Government
College Lahore after which he joined Law College, Punjab University, where he came
first in the LLB examination in 1937. In 1941, he joined the Indian Civil Service and
proceeded to Oxford for further education and training. Upon his return to India, his
first posting as a Government Officer was in Ahmadnagar, Bombay Presidency; from
there he was sent to Khandesh to work on the uplift of downtrodden Bhil tribes. His
efforts there earned him the title of ‘Masud Bhagwan’. In 1946, Masud was transferred
to Nawabshah (Sindh) as Deputy Commissioner. In 1947, at the time of partition, he
opted for Pakistan and continued at the same posting in Nawabshah. See http://
pakistanprayers.blogspot.co.uk/2006/04/masud-khaddarposh-human-rights.html
(accessed December 2018). In the run up to 1946 provincial elections, and knowing
that he was a supporter of the idea of Pakistan, Congress politicians, afraid that his
popularity among haris would swing votes in favour of the Muslim League, had
mounted a campaign to get Masud transferred from Nawabshah, in response to
which a Sindhi vernacular pro-League newspaper commented in October that year:
‘Mr. Masud’s only offence is that he helped the poor haris against the powerful
zamindars and saved them from their oppression and tyranny. The Hindu Press has
therefore moved heaven and earth against Mr Masud … The Hindu Congress has
turned against him because he is attacking the vested interests and the zamindars … and
the Congress is helping the vested interests …’, Al Wahid, 13 October 1948.
110
M. Masud, ‘Hari Committee Report Note of Dissent’, Roger Thomas Papers, Mss Eur
F235/650 BL.
111
UKHC Opdom 104, 24–30 December 1948, L/PO/12/14 BL.
 Dalit, Tribal and Hari Rights 253

Mr Masud is believed to have expressed strong views on the existing disabilities of

the haris and suggested far-reaching changes. There is a feeling among sections of
the public that the Sind Ministry, whose parliamentary support is largely derived
from Zamindar elements, may not only shelve the minority report of the Hari
Committee but even withhold it from the public.

Similarly, the Pakistan Times (itself critical of the authorities for failing to
meet the expectations of Pakistan’s ‘common man’) commented in an
editorial from May 1948 that
The Note of Dissent … draws its inspiration from Islamic history and traditions;
and after a study of the conditions of Sind agriculture and review of land reforms
in Western countries, it recommends the complete nationalization of land. The
only justification for what time and money was spent on the Hari Committee
seems to be this minority report.112
Masud – who wrote that the condition of the haris was deplorable,
differences between landlord and tenant too severe and unfair and,
therefore, land reforms absolutely necessary – called instead for the
complete abolition of zamindari system, the expropriation of land from
landlords with minimum compensation and that absolute ownership of
land should be vested in the state. In the process, he located his argument
squarely in the context of the post-Partition challenges facing Pakistan:
The shortage of agricultural labour in Sind has been due to the existing insecurity
of the tenant, this factor in turn has discouraged immigration, and now the
shortage of labour has been accentuated by the exodus of about two lacs of
Koli, Bhil and Mainghwar haris [non-Muslims]. Tharparkar district is threated
with a big drop in the cultivated area this year and consequently a serious fall in
food production as well as State revenues. The refugees could fill this gap, but
they are prevented from settling in Sind by the complete insecurity of tenure and
hostile surroundings. A situation such as this threatens the prosperity and
productivity of the whole of Sind and in Sind’s own interest more than
anything else, it is necessary that a new approach should be made to the
problem. By the expropriation of zamindars and the creation of peasant
proprietorship Sind will not only solve the problem of its 20 lacs haris but also
help the cause of refugee resettlement on a very large scale, which is the foremost
problem of Pakistan.113

Protest against the withholding of Masud’s Note of Dissent surfaced

quickly, with pressure on the Sindh Provincial Muslim League and
district League committees to pass resolutions demanding its publica-
tion. Students also agitated. Even the president of the All-Pakistan
Muslim League, Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman, personally appealed to the

112
Pakistan Times, 21 May 1948.
113
Masud, ‘Hari Committee Report Note of Dissent’, p. 98.
254 ‘Hidden Citizens’ in 1940s and 1950s India and Pakistan

Sindh governor, urging him to intervene to make the provincial govern-

ment yield to public demand.114 With a new Sindh chief minister in
post (Yusuf Haroon) who lacked the customary landed connections, the
Sindhi authorities finally published Masud’s ‘Note’ in June 1949. As its
opening statement made clear, it represented a full-bodied attack on the
status quo: ‘[Haris] are human beings, and as such, rational animals and
though they drudge like domesticated animals, they enjoy no privileges of
rationality, nor any rights of human beings’.115 From the perspective of
local Communist Party activists, the problem of tenancy reform was one
part of a bigger set of issues confronting people in Sindh:
The rise and fall of Ministers in Sind, the disastrous floods that could have been
prevented, the practice of smuggling food grains across the Borders leading to
food shortage in a surplus province, the bribery and corruption rampant in the
administration, the bungling policy in settling refugees, the wide-spread chaos
that is haunting the province, all these things are not accidental but form an
integral part of the Zamindari system, and can only end with it.116
Included among the demands now made the Hari Committee were
‘education to be made universal, free and compulsory’, and ‘new elec-
tions to be held on the basis of adult franchise’.117 Indeed, a convention
organized by hari leaders in Karachi in March 1949 highlighted this lack
of representation:
How the voice of the Hari has been suppressed could best be judged from the fact
that in the House elected under the present Constitution [the Sindh Legislative
Assembly], 30 lakhs of Haris do not have one single representative in the
Assembly whom they could call their own. The 30,000 Trade Union Workers
of Sind have only one representative, Qazi Mujtaba … Not that Hari does not
have a vote but what with the fear of the Zamindar and the canvasing for votes
done on behalf of the Zamindars by mobilizing Pirs and Maulvies [sic]. How can
the Hari exercise his vote freely, under these circumstances?118

At the end of the meeting, its president – flushed with excitement –

declared that the haris were not prepared to give up the Red Flag: ‘it
was the flag of the oppressed [and] as long as exploitation continued, so
long would the Red Flag be the symbol of their struggle against
oppression’.119

114
Dawn, 4 January 1949. 115
Masud, ‘Hari Committee Report Note of Dissent’, p. 1.
116
‘Hari Movement’, The Communist Party of West Pakistan in Action, Published by the
Deputy Inspector-General of Police, C.I.D., Punjab, Lahore (Lahore: Superintendent
Government Printing, Punjab, 1952), p. 129.
117
Ibid., p. 130. 118
Abdul Khaliq Azad, ‘Sind Haris on the March’, ibid., p. 143.
119
Ibid., p. 145.
 Dalit, Tribal and Hari Rights 255

In March 1949, a Sind Tenancy Bill had been published with the
stated intention of regulating the rights and liabilities of tenants and
landlords in the province.120 At a government-sponsored joint ‘Hari-
Zamindar Conference’ in April, hari representatives demanded heredi-
tary rights to the land that they ploughed, with no time qualifications.
They also wanted to substitute batai (crop sharing) with cash rents, and
demanded the abolition of forced labour (begar) .121 In 1950, more than
15,000 peasants from across the province gathered in Karachi where they
conducted a ‘sit-in’ outside the Sindh Legislative Assembly, and such
was the strength of support that assembly members were not allowed to
leave the building. In the event, though the Sindh Assembly passed
tenancy legislation in 1950, its implementation was delayed, and by
March 1951, the recently re-appointed Sindh Chief Minister M. A.
Khuhro felt sufficiently confident to declare – much to the surprise of
many of his contemporaries – that Sindh’s hari problem only existed in
‘some newspaper offices’.122 According to press reports of his speech,
‘what Mr Khuhro did not say [was] that he was determined to make
his “poor zamindars” richer and the “rich hari” poorer’.123 At a well-
attended public meeting of Sindh haris held soon afterwards in
Hyderabad, speaker after speaker criticized the Sindh Legislative Assem-
bly, describing it as a body that represented only vested interests, while
peasants who comprised the vast majority of the province’s population
remained completely unrepresented in it: ‘Nothing short of the immedi-
ate dissolution of the Assembly and new elections on the basis of univer-
sal franchise would satisfy the peasants’.124 All the same, as hari leader
Hyder Bux Jatoi pointed out, ‘in spite of 15 years of service of the Hari
Committee for the cause of haris, [haris were] still at the mercy of
zamindars, with no proprietary interest in the land’.125
In February 1952, a Hari Committee deputation, headed by Jatoi,
presented its latest set of demands to the Sindh governor, Din
Mohammad. These included proposed amendments to the Sind
Tenancy Act, and rights for haris on land that they were presently
cultivating.126 In response, the governor assured hari representatives that
they would not be hindered in their political work as long as it remained
constitutional. The following day, Jatoi and his fellow hari leader, Abdul

120
Sind Government Gazette, 3 March 1949.
121
‘Haris Want Hereditary Rights in Land and Substitution of Batai System by Cash Rent’,
Dawn, 23 April 1949.
122 123
Dawn, 28 March 1951. Civil and Military Gazette, 30 March 1951.
124
Civil and Military Gazette, February 1951.
125 126
Civil and Military Gazette, 30 March 1951. Dawn, 3 February 1952.
256 ‘Hidden Citizens’ in 1940s and 1950s India and Pakistan

Kadir, reiterated their call for the abolition of zamindari, without com-
pensation. But they were also careful to assure refugee agriculturalists of
their ‘fraternal feelings’, and accused zamindars of creating differences
between local haris and muhajirs (refugees).127 In a conference held in
Umarkot in July, reportedly attended by nearly 20,000 people and pre-
sided over by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, then Secretary of the All-Pakistan
Confederation of Labour, the Sind Hari Federation once more
issued its call for the abolition of the zamindar system without com-
pensation and the ‘allotment of land to toilers of the soil’ on an equitable
basis.128
A report on ‘Muslim tribes’ in Sindh compiled by US officials in
1955 underlined the continuing predicament of the province’s haris.
The Sind Tenancy Act may have represented a first step towards greater
protection for their interests (by granting permanent tenancy rights
[harep] as long as the same plot of land had been cultivated for three
consecutive years), but in practice, ‘according to the law, a hari [had to]
apply for his harep rights, and due to unawareness of the law or fear of the
landlord, not 5 per cent of the haris have gained [them] since the passage
of the Tenancy Act’.129 Furthermore, as another – earlier – report had
pointed out, the legislation anyway contained loopholes that ‘allowed the
landholder to follow the letter if not the spirit of the law’, which in the
case of Sindh was ‘emasculated by evasive language’, and so the passage
of the legislation there, rather than strengthening their rights, had led to
the ‘widespread eviction of tenants’.130
The creation of Pakistan, as reflected in developments in Sindh during
the post-Independence period, heightened the significance of other kinds
of identity that were not linked quite so directly to being or not being a
Muslim. In the scramble for resources that Partition generated, dividing
lines were often more complex than a simple ‘Muslim’ versus ‘non-
Muslim’. As demonstrated by the desire to integrate the Hur followers
of the Pir Pagaro into mainstream society, and likewise the struggles
concerning land rights by the province’s exploited haris, discussion about
material entitlement – in particular that on offer on the ground in what
had become Pakistan – could be inflected by expectations about the
impact of Independence on people’s everyday lives and what over
the longer run this meant for their position as equal citizens within the
new state.

127 128
Dawn, 4 February 1952. Dawn, 11 July 1952.
129
‘Information on Sind Muslim Tribes, and Other Groups’, Despatch 765, 23 May 1955,
350.00/5-2355 USNA.
130
‘The Problem of Land Reform in Pakistan’, 6 September 1951, 702.5/9-651 USNA.
 Conclusion 257

Conclusion
As this chapter has explored, not only were certain communities in places
such as UP and Sindh excluded from typical frameworks of citizenship
rights in postcolonial India and Pakistan, but also the latter were some-
times established to marginalize them deliberately, requiring them to
seek out alternative methods for lobbying government. Despite this,
Muslims, Dalits and other groups of people in India still rallied around
the presumed logic of legal rights contained within the 1950
Constitution, alongside the implications of affirmative action that were
contained within its Fundamental Rights. Even though ‘secularism’ was
not placed directly in the preamble of the Constitution until 1976, yet
still there was a sense among Muslim leaders in UP, for instance, that
Indian legislators were – in the main – striving for a multicultural plural
society. The fragility of processes of secularization, however (for which,
as Mushirul Hasan has argued, few strove in reality),131 meant that
moments of mass communal strife, especially during those involving
cross-border tensions, could raise the spectre of a removal of rights, or
an attack on the remnants of Indo-Islamic culture in India. This also
meant that Muslims in India were required to devise careful and more
strategically limited ways of promoting group rights.
In some ways, therefore, the normative and universal rights of citizens
in both India and Pakistan were framed as forms of protection against
communities that were unsettled and disadvantaged, perhaps marked as
‘backward’ or indeed sometimes as ‘criminal’. This made the working
(and prior to that, the working out) of differentiated rights very difficult.
We might relate this unfolding reality to what Nivedita Menon describes
as clashing moral universes of ‘rights’, which are ineffectively adjudicated
by law.132 For the most part, our excluded or ‘hidden’ citizens in both
India and Pakistan devised alternative means for asserting or promoting
rights – new kinds of lobbying organizations, alternative forms of
petitions, sit-ins and other kinds of mass protest, through which to try
to make their voices heard. In the lead-up to Independence, this tactic
could involve unusual short-term strategic alliances, such as that between
Ambedkar and the Muslim League in the late 1930s.133 But in the main,
after August 1947 and in the late 1940s and early 1950s, we see particular
forms of associational politics emerging in the cities and countryside of

131
Hasan, Legacy of a Divided Nation, p. 145.
132
Nivedita Menon, ‘State/Gender/Community: Citizenship in Contemporary India’,
Economic and Political Weekly 33, 5 (1998), pp. 3–10.
133
Chairez-Garza, ‘Bound Hand and Foot’, p. 4.
258 ‘Hidden Citizens’ in 1940s and 1950s India and Pakistan

UP and Sindh, which tied more general issues of food and civil supply, or
government corruption, to specific questions of identity and belonging.
Finally, we might likewise relate these activities to the very specific spaces
and neighbourhoods of these places themselves, and the media used to
report on them. Such ‘hidden citizens’, while being generally excluded
from the normal frameworks of rights enjoyed by those with access to
political influence, were beginning – as early as the first decade following
Independence – to carve out new or reconfigured repertoires of politics
in our specific locales within Pakistan and India.
 Epilogue and Conclusion

On 26 December 2017 while attending a political function in Kukanur

in Karnataka, the Union Minister Anant Kumar Hegde stated that the
BJP would ‘change the Constitution’, and especially in relation to its
references to ‘secularism’.1

Call 1135 if anyone sees any sort of rigging/paid voters/snatching of

NICs or any sort of UNFAIR proceedings on 25 July. Call this number
immediately, be responsible, play your part as an honest citizen.2
(emphasis added)

In Boundaries of Belonging, we have considered how far the rights of and

the concepts surrounding the ‘citizen’ in both India and Pakistan, and the
promotion of those rights, were affected by what was happening across the
new border in the years following Independence and Partition. We have
explored this at the state level, but also considered what it meant from the
perspective of two localities, UP and Sindh, that came to be closely
connected, thanks to the protracted impact of Partition on understand-
ings about citizenship, rights and belonging across the subcontinent. And
the connection continued, though the form taken by it has varied, as the
second half of the twentieth century wore on. This relationship, we would
argue, can be seen perhaps most clearly in the ways in which both new
states subsequently managed the promises of ‘universal’ citizenship rights
set against the realities of diverse and varied group claims upon them. In
many ways, however, this tension is not easily captured in most general
works on the concept of citizenship. The problem in much of the litera-
ture, as recognized by Will Kymlicka, is that ‘most Western political
theorists have operated within an idealized model of the polis in which

1
Maya Sharma, ‘“We Are Here to Change the Constitution” Says Union Minister in New
Controversy’, NDTV, 26 December 2017, www.ndtv.com/india-news/we-are-here-to-
change-the-constitution-says-union-minister-anant-kumar-hegde-in-new-controversy-
1792197 (accessed December 2018).
2
Advice to Pakistani voters during the general elections of July 2018, shared widely on
social media. (NIC = national identity card.)

259
260 Epilogue and Conclusion

fellow citizens share a common descent, language and culture’.3 Both

India and (to a lesser extent) Pakistan shared this tradition but both also
incorporated a statutory concept of differentiated or group rights, which
has been implemented (in the case of India certainly) more clearly since
the 1990s, and in Pakistan to different degrees at various points following
its creation. This epilogue will summarize the main arguments of this
book, following a survey of some of the contemporary outcomes flowing
out of our period of focus in the mid-twentieth century.
There are pressing contemporary reasons for examining the immediate
context in which constitutional experiments and ideas about citizenship
and rights unfolded in South Asia in the late 1940s and 1950s. In recent
decades, the constitutions of both countries have come under fresh
scrutiny, connected in large part with ongoing challenges to the political
status quo. In twenty-first-century India, citizens are exploring and cri-
tiquing their constitutional framework in new ways, as reflected in the
proliferation of rights-based movements that have come to prominence
since 2010, especially those centred on women, sexuality, ethnicity and
anti-corruption. On the other hand, since 2014 and again in 2019, with
the election victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India, particu-
lar constitutional rights, and the legal frameworks that arise from them,
have been subject to new contestations of its pluralistic representation of
Indian society. In Pakistan, the state has been challenged in much the
same fashion by well-supported citizens campaigns that range from those
focussed on enduring problems of corruption and disadvantage to others
that unequivocally oppose or defend the rights of minorities and women.
Almost since their inception, though in ways that have varied by region
and community, levels of popular engagement have generated legal
activism, out of which civil society initiatives have emerged, often in
particular localities, on both sides of the border.
Pivotal developments in South Asian politics now revolve around an
array of issues-based movements that resonate with the discussions
on citizenship and rights that took place following Independence. The
growth of anti-corruption movements between 2005 and 2012 across the
subcontinent, echoing those of the 1940s and 1950s, now push for the
exposure of high-level political corruption and greater access for citizens
to information on day-to-day administration. Particularly since 2012, in
the case of India, women’s security and debates about a possible Uni-
form Civil Code have become key battlegrounds for political parties
across the spectrum, challenging the constraints on women’s rights in

3
Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 2.
 Epilogue and Conclusion 261

practice, while in Pakistan, supposedly woman-friendly legislation con-

tinues to fail to address the myriad problems that plague women’s lives
there. From these social movements, an array of other rights agendas
have emerged – including environmental challenges and rights around
disability, themselves affected or implicated by the rapid globalization of
rights movements, as communications technologies have developed in
the twenty-first century.
Rights movements have, of course, transformed in response to the
changing nature of globalization, the weakening of the nation state
and the growth of transnational corporate power. Globalization conse-
quently has limited but also created opportunities for human rights
movements that have been able to draw on frameworks such as the
United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.4 This has led, in turn,
to what some scholars have described as ‘transnational advocacy
networks’.5 Counter-hegemonic movements originating largely from
the Global South have posed new challenges to national legal frame-
works, as well as highlighted the need for multi-sited ethnography.6 Since
the turn of the millennium, they have tended to converge in anti-
globalization citizens’ movements operating on both the right and the
left of the political spectrum. These have implicated NGOs that,
although often synonymous with protest, have also sometimes helped
to channel and control protest movements, and justify the rolling back of
the welfare state.7 India’s Dalit movement and that of adivasis and
DNTs, for instance, has become more clearly international since the
1990s, with the global expression of rights. Conferences of the inter-
national Dalit diaspora have been formed since 1998 in Canada, Malaysia
and the UK,8 while the United Nations Human Rights Commission has
made some interventions around the recognition of Dalit rights.
Interestingly, frequent reference to the early formative periods of
constitutional development is used to bolster contemporary politics and

4
For a theoretical discussion of these expanding frameworks, see John A. Guidry, Michael
D. Kennedy and Mayer N. Zald, Globalizations and Social Movements: Culture, Power and
the Transnational Public Sphere (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000),
pp. 2–12.
5
Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Cesar A. Rodriguez-Garavito, Law and Globalization
from Below: Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004).
6
Ibid., p. 4.
7
Marjorie Mayo, Global Citizens: Social Movements and the Challenge of Globalization (New
York: Zed Books, 2005), pp. 155–6.
8
Vivek Kumar, India’s Roaring Revolution: Dalit Assertions and New Horizons (Delhi:
Gagandeep Publications, 2006); B. V. Muralidhar et al. (eds.), The Dynamics of Change
and Continuity in the Era of Globalization: Voices from the Margins (New Delhi: Sunrise
Publications, 2009).
262 Epilogue and Conclusion

activism in today’s South Asia.9 In political debates in India, the signifi-

cance of the 1950 Constitution continues to be most clearly articulated in
the complex but ubiquitous reference to the legacy of B. R. Ambedkar,
and the championing of differentiated rights. Even though the election
of a right-wing Hindu nationalist government in 2014 and 2019 repre-
sented a fateful break from decades of Congress dominance in Delhi,
Narendra Modi’s BJP regime makes explicit rhetorical connections with
the late 1940s/early 1950s Congress heyday, with the iconography
of Vallabhai Patel celebrated in the form of a world record-breaking
gigantic iron statue being the most obtrusive example.10 In present-day
Pakistan, the context may look different but the rhetoric can be remark-
ably similar, involving often a harking back to what Pakistan’s early
political leaders are deemed to have promised but failed to deliver. Power
may have been transferred from one civilian government to another in
the 2013 and 2018 general elections, but the public’s trust in the demo-
cratic process remains low, and scepticism about the role of the military
pulling political strings behind the scenes endures: as one newspaper
columnist in 2018 explained, ‘mimicking democracy and providing a
façade of elections cannot develop a political dynamic including budget-
ary allocations to redress the long-standing grievances and deep-rooted
disabilities of the people. Despite electoral swings and wobbles, such
elections merely reflect and reinforce existing structures of repression
and power, which are making Pakistan a political dystopia’.11 A satirical
piece in the run-up to the 2018 national polls similarly advised political
leaders ‘scampering’ to gain the public’s trust, ‘Do not even worry about
making any promises. If you can ridicule the other party’s promises
repeatedly then it will seem like you have an agenda. Better yet you can
mask your political motives under a veneer of social causes’.12

9
Vinay Sitapati, ‘What Anna Hazare and the Indian Middle-Classes Say about Each
Other’, Economic and Political Weekly 46, 30 (23 July 2011), pp. 39–44.
10
The monumental statue of Vallabhbhai Patel has been constructed facing the Narmada
Dam, 3.2 kilometre away, on a river island called Sadhu Bet, in the Indian state of Gujarat.
It is twice the size of the US Statue of Liberty in New York, costing nearly Rs. 3,000 crore.
Most importantly, it has led to the displacement of a number of adivasi villages in the region.
On 31 October 2018, the date of its inauguration, this resulted in a protest among adivasis
and migrant workers. See, ‘A Statue of Unity in a Gujarat Deeply Divided’, Live Mint
31 October 2018, www.livemint.com/Politics/QnAJqGsmyuFTTwgjEYOWgN/Sardar-
Patel-Statue-of-Unity-inauguration-Narendra-Modi.html (accessed December 2018).
11
Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, ‘Elections and Movements’, Dawn, 5 May 2018, www.dawn.com/
news/1405769 (accessed December 2018).
12
‘How to Win the 2018 Elections’, The Herald, 25 January 2018, https://
herald.dawn.com/news/1153986 (accessed December 2018).
 Epilogue and Conclusion 263

As we have explored in Boundaries of Belonging, from the early 1930s –

well before Independence – caste interest groups in places like UP had
begun to lobby government for special consideration in administrative
appointments, with direct reference to putative constitutional changes.
These differences and early applications of India’s 1950 Constitution
allowed a number of rights organizations, especially Dalit and adivasi, to
evoke it as a ‘bill of rights’ in support of their struggles. Historians
and political scientists have rightly located in these earlier responses
the roots of local mobilizations that, over recent decades, have used the
Constitution and concepts of legal rights to challenge traditional caste
hierarchies.13 While some have argued that the rise of caste-based party
politics threatens the ability of the state to govern,14 more common has
been the suggestion that, since the electoral decline of the Congress,
democracy has instead been strengthened by the more widespread
participation of low-status and marginalized communities.15 We would
argue that current ideas about a ‘crisis of governability’ are similarly
based in historically erroneous assumptions about state control and
political dominance occurring in the post-1947 South Asia: in particular,
that citizens’ movements, structured in some cases around group and
ethnicized concepts of rights, were already subverting, challenging and
channelling state hegemony by the early 1950s, not just in India but also
in Pakistan.
However, as highlighted in our Introduction, it is only relatively
recently that historians have started to incorporate anthropological meth-
odologies for exploring the workings of the state, and citizen engagement
with it, in South Asia.16 This methodological shift has accompanied –
even prompted – fresh theoretical and empirical reflections on the liminal
quotidian interactions between the state, its representatives and its
presumed citizens.17 Not only does rethinking along these lines represent
the basis for a potential history of citizenship ‘from below’; it also shapes

13
See, for instance, Hugo Gorringe, Untouchable Citizens: Dalit Movements and
Democratization in Tamil Nadu (New Delhi: Sage, 2005); Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s
Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003).
14
Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India’s Growing Crisis of Governability (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 3–5.
15
Gorringe, Untouchable Citizens, pp. 22–3.
16
C. J. Fuller and Veronique Benei (eds.), The Everyday State and Society in Modern India
(New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2000); Akhil Gupta, ‘Blurred Boundaries: The
Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State’, American
Ethnologist 22, 2 (May 1995), pp. 375–402.
17
See Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (London: Yale
University Press, 2007); William Gould, Bureaucracy, Community and Influence: Society
and the State in India, 1930–1960s (London: Routledge, 2011); Jonathan Saha, Law,
264 Epilogue and Conclusion

and alters existing views of the state, in terms of how and how far the
state’s administrative and executive structures are contested, and pro-
duced, by various imaginaries of the ‘public’ that circulate and feed back
into law making.18 What applies to the administration applies even more
so to judicial and electoral politics. Work on the law in India, for
instance, has departed from its previous more traditional approaches
towards the 1950 Constitution as a statement of rights and legal struc-
tures, viewing it instead as an edifice that provides the foundations for
legal dispute, challenge and reinterpretation.19 Its legal core now serves
to empower various gendered political interests that reach back to the late
nineteenth century,20 but which were transformed by way of political
devolution in the interwar years.21 The common experiences bound up
in India and Pakistan’s immediate post-Independence elections (national
in the case of India, at the provincial level and below in Pakistan) likewise
underline how far the process of creating and implementing universal
suffrage drove popular responses to constitutional change. Changes in
historical scholarship on South Asia (and, more specifically, approaches
to the state there) that have emerged since the turn of the twenty-first
century – in the form of explorations of law, the everyday state, civil
society, citizenship and democracy – have thus directly shaped the con-
text for and content of our book.
In sanctioning what still remains probably the world’s most intricate
set of constitutional arrangements, India’s early postcolonial rulers over-
saw the drawing up and implementation of a document which, in due
course, became the cornerstone of a range of different rights movements.

Disorder and the Colonial State: Corruption in Burma c.1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013).
18
Joel S. Migdal, State-in-Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute
One Another (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Joel S. Migdal (ed.),
Boundaries and Belonging: States and Societies in the Struggle to Shape Identities and Local
Practices (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Michael Warner, Publics and
Counterpublics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
19
Rohit De, A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), pp. 1–25; Rohit De, ‘Rebellion,
Dacoity, and Equality: The Emergence of the Constitutional Field in Postcolonial
India’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34, 2 (2014),
pp. 260–78. This is also clear in work that has explored the quotidian (politically
mediated) responses to East African constitutions. Devra C. Moehler, ‘Participation
and Support for the Constitution in Uganda’, Journal of Modern African Studies 44, 2
(2006), pp. 275–308.
20
Indrani Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1999).
21
Mrinalini Sinha, Gender and Nation (Washington, DC: American Historical Association,
2006); Eleanor Newbigin, The Hindu Family and the Emergence of Modern India: Law,
Citizenship and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
 Epilogue and Conclusion 265

As a consequence, the 1950 Constitution can be viewed as a document

that stated certain universal rights from the outset, but which also took
into account the range of specific sectional groups whose social disadvan-
tages required a degree of state intervention. Accordingly, India’s consti-
tutional framework did not necessarily generate a milieu of liberal
‘benign neglect’,22 but (in theory at least) promoted systems of affirma-
tive action, albeit hesitantly at first. Unlike most attempts at affirmative
action elsewhere, however, these measures did not turn out to be tem-
porary in nature or in practice; rather, they sought to address deep
historical inequalities over an indefinite timeframe. The Indian approach
in practice persisted despite the fact that the Nehruvian rhetoric of social
equality focussed on standard ‘universally held’ ideas of citizens’ rights
within an idealized polis – what Ornit Shani and others have termed a
‘Liberal’ concept of citizenship.23 The failure of the first Backward
Classes Commission of 1953, in the end, was premised on the idea that
‘backwardness’ as a condition could not be entirely explained by caste,
but rather as the limitations of modernity.24 The clear expectation was
that as Indian society transformed in the years ahead, so too would the
inequalities of caste be reduced. Commission reporters argued that
[the] inferiority complex cultivated by the backward communities leads them to
believe that they are, and will always remain, deficient in certain qualities, and
therefore, they need the backing of reservation. Experience in the past proves that
reservations come in the way of healthy emulation and those who learnt to
depend on reservation are oftentimes not alert enough to improve their quality.25
In India, since the late 1970s, there has been a clear shift towards
caste-based political challenges to the political status quo. Though the
concept of ‘scheduled castes and scheduled tribes’ (SC/ST) that was
reinforced in the Indian Constitution had its roots in earlier constitu-
tional formulations, the idea of ‘backward classes’ (BCs) was not

22
Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy (New York:
Basic Books, Inc., 1975).
23
Ornit Shani, ‘Concepts of Citizenship in India and the “Muslim Question”’, Modern
Asian Studies 44, 1 (2010), pp. 145–73; Anupama Roy, Mapping Citizenship in India
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Filiz Kartal, ‘Liberal and Republican
Conceptualizations of Citizenship: A Theoretical Inquiry’, Turkish Public
Administration Annual 27–28 (January 2001), pp. 101–30.
24
M. S. Srinivas (ed.), Caste: Its Twentieth Century Avatar (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000);
Nomita Yadav, ‘Other Backward Classes: Then and Now’, Economic and Political Weekly
37, 44/45 (2–15 November 2002), pp. 4495–500; Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘The Impact of
Affirmative Action in India: More Political Than Socioeconomic’, India Review 5, 12
(2006), pp. 173–89.
25
Government of India, Report of the Backward Classes Commission, 3 vols. (Shimla:
Government of India Press, 1955), p. viii.
266 Epilogue and Conclusion

reignited until the formation of the Janata government in India in 1977.26

This coalition of opposition parties, which came to power on a wave of
anti-Congress sentiment, set up the Mandal Commission in 1979 with a
mandate to ‘identify the socially or educationally backward classes’ of
India. Its 1980 proposals for 27 per cent reservations for BCs (which it
estimated made up 52 per cent of India’s total population) was eventually
implemented, amid great controversy, in 1992 by the then minority Con-
gress government.27 From the mid-1990s, the Dalit movement proliferated
into a range of different political and nongovernmental forums, managing
to form ministries in some cases. Dalit movements such as Bahujan Samaj
Party were especially successful in UP – one of the places on which
Boundaries of Belonging has focussed – but a similar process was at work
in other Indian states including Tamil Nadu (Viduthalai Chiruthaigal
Katchi), Maharashtra (Republican Party) and Bihar (Lok Janshakti Party).
The contemporary political/electoral basis for the Dalit and adivasi
movements emerging across India in the recent past, however, does
not represent the full and arguably more complex historical picture of
‘non-political’ movements that have sprung from the grassroots. And
it is these that connect back, more clearly, to the earliest historical devel-
opments of caste-based civic movements in the wake of Independence.
These include, among others, the Backward and Minority Castes Employ-
ees Federation (BAMCEF) that has promoted a range of non-political
social organizations at local levels, and the Bharatiya Dalit Panthers.28
These groups are rather more like older pressure groups operating
in earlier decades, working on lobbying administrations from below,
rather than depending entirely on the patronage of leading Dalit parties.
Many of the urban-based groups in UP cities such as Kanpur, Allahabad
and Lucknow concentrate on conversion of Dalits to Buddhism, but
in some cases (e.g. under the leadership of Dhaniram Panther) have
also furthered the rights of Dalit state employees, and supported commu-
nities in ‘getting work done’ with the local administration.29 In Western
India too, grassroots Dalit movements, for example among Mangs,
have been actively instrumental in campaigning against caste-based

26
For the role of the courts in this process of recognition of Backward Class categories, see
Marc Gallanter, ‘Who Are the Other Backward Classes?’, Economic and Political Weekly,
13, 43/44 (28 October 1978), pp. 1812–28.
27
For the complete text of the Mandal Commission report, see National Commission for
Backward Classes: A Statutory Body under the Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment,
www.ncbc.nic.in/User_Panel/UserView.aspx?TypeID=1161 (accessed December 2018).
28
Nicolas Jaoul, ‘Political and “Non-Political” Means in the Dalit Movement’, in Political
Process in Uttar Pradesh: Identity, Economic Reforms, and Governance, ed. Sudha Pai
(Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2007), pp. 191–220.
29
Ibid.
 Epilogue and Conclusion 267

violence.30 In this sense, perhaps just as durable as Dalit political representa-

tion, have been networks of Dalit employees in the administration – a pattern
that was recognized in Dalit rights movements in early independent India.
One of the most prominent non-political rights movements to emerge in
India alongside SC and ST organizations has been the Denotified Tribes
Rights Action Group (DNT RAG), initiated in 1998 under the leadership
of Ganesh Devi, Mahasveta Devi and Laxman Gaikwad, also involving a
range of grassroots arts movements, including most prominently a street
theatre and film-making group, Budhan Theatre. The latter, led by
Dakxin Chhara Bajrange based in Ahmedabad, has, again since the early
2000s, consistently lobbied the authorities, especially around the differen-
tiated rights of people whom this group self-categorizes as ‘DNTs’ in
different states across India: some fall within the category of SC or ST
while others are contained within official schedules of OBC. The DNT
RAG have used street performance and protest campaigns to promote a
particular vision of Indian citizenship which shines a spotlight on the
historical injustice done to these adivasi groups in urban public spheres.31
From the outset, it highlighted key instances of police brutality and custo-
dial deaths,32 most famously, the case of Budhan Sabar who died in police
custody in February 1998 in West Bengal.33 The DNT RAG claims to be
unique – not quite an NGO, nor a pressure group on government, but
more a movement – and it promotes a wide array of causes that all connect
around the specific marginalization of ex-Criminal Tribe communities as
Indian citizens. Rather than attempting to critique directly the fundamen-
tal assumptions of state power in relation to such marginal communities,
the movement bases its activity on pragmatic Ambedkarite approaches to
the role of the state in promoting group rights in today’s India.34

30
Suryakhant Whagmore, Civility against Caste: Dalit Politics and Citizenship in Western
India (New Delhi: Sage, 2013), pp. 62–90.
31
Caleb Johnston and Dakxin Bajrange, ‘Street Theatre as Democratic Politics in
Ahmedabad’, Antipode 46, 2 (2014), pp. 455–76.
32
See, for example Dilip D’Souza, ‘De-Notified Tribes: Still “Criminal”?’, Economic and
Political Weekly 34, 51 (18–24 December 1999), pp. 3576–8.
33
Ganesh Devy, ‘For a Nomad Called Thief’, in Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature
and Human Rights in a ‘Post’-Colonial World, eds. Peter H. Marsden and Geoffrey
V. Davis (Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 2004), pp. 282–3.
34
William Gould, Sarah Gandee and Dakxin Bajrange, ‘Settling the Citizen, Settling the
Nomad: “Habitual Offenders”, Rebellion and Civic Consciousness in Western India,
1938–1952’, Modern Asian Studies, http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/144745/, 2019. Its
work feeds into a range of other regional lobbying organizations working for DNTs to
promote a sub-quota of reservations: The DNT Adhikar Manch from Gujarat, the Lok
Dhara from Maharashtra and the All Indian Od Welfare Sangh from Karnataka.
268 Epilogue and Conclusion

In Pakistan, the story of citizenship and rights has followed a somewhat

different track, thanks to the changing nature and composition of society
there since 1947. As far as the position of non-Muslims has been con-
cerned, the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 meant that Pakistan was more
than halved in size population-wise, and the majority (though by no
means all) of its non-Muslims (Hindu Bengalis) faced the future as
citizens of a different state. In what remained of Pakistan (its western
wing), Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government
played the religion card as a way of reinforcing the shared identity of
Pakistan’s remaining citizens. The replacement 1973 Constitution
declared Islam to be the state religion, even if the meaning attached to
this was different to how it would be interpreted by the Islamization
policies of General Zia ul Haq in the late 1970s and 1980s. The fallout
from Bhutto’s move, intended to see off his religio-political critics,
included the creation of a new category of differentiated citizenship on
the one hand, and added challenges for existing non-Muslim minorities
on the other. The Ahmadiyya community, which had been targeted since
the 1950s on the grounds of denying the finality of the Prophet Muham-
mad, was now declared constitutionally ‘non-Muslim’, its members (like
others categorized as ‘non-Muslim’) excluded from the full, undifferen-
tiated, benefits of citizenship. According to a 2011 report on Pakistan’s
minority communities which counted Ahmadis within this category,
It remains a cause for worry that the Pakistani state still expects key affirmations
of citizenship, such as applying for a passport, to include a deliberate othering of
Ahmadis, by disavowing them in a separate clause. While this clause has
repeatedly come up for discussion for removal in Parliament, the religious
lobby has been successful in silencing its critics. However, the notion that it is
essential to sign an anti-Ahmadi clause on forms used for issuing or renewing
passports is not entirely correct. A small, but growing number of citizens have
reportedly refused to sign the clause, yet succeeded in obtaining a passport.35
Later under Zia and the regimes that followed, the position of Ahmadis
became steadily more difficult. Efforts to reverse the marginalization of
the Ahmadiyya community have proved ineffective, and its second-class
status remains a feature of twenty-first-century Pakistani society and
politics. More generally, accusations of blasphemy and vigilante reprisals
have featured as a growing problem in Pakistan over the last two decades.
High-profile cases include the murder of serving governor of Punjab
Salman Taseer by a member of his police bodyguard in 2011 in revenge

35
Mariam Faruqi, A Question of Faith: A Report on the Status of Religious Minorities in Pakistan
(Islamabad: Jinnah Institute, 2011), p. 60, https://starfishasia.com/assets/Jinnah_Minority_
Report20511-PDF.pdf.
 Epilogue and Conclusion 269

for his support for Asia Bibi (a Christian woman sentenced to death in
2010 for blasphemy but controversially acquitted by the Supreme Court
in 2018 on the grounds of material contradictions and inconsistent
statements of the witnesses that the judges felt cast a shadow of doubt
on the prosecution’s version of facts),36 the killing of Shahbaz Bhatti –
Christian Cabinet member and outspoken critic of Pakistan’s blasphemy
laws – two months later and the arrest the following year of a Christian
girl Rimsha Masih for allegedly burning pages from the Quran.37
In 2010, Pakistan ratified Article 27 of the International Convention
on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), accepting the entitlement of
minorities ‘in community with the other members of their group, to
enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to
use their own language’.38 By then, however, Sindh, home to c. 95 per
cent of Hindus still living in Pakistan, was already witnessing rising levels
of tension and violence directed against the province’s non-Muslims.
General-turned-President Pervez Musharraf, meanwhile, had scrapped
the controversial separate electorates introduced in 1980s by Zia
according to which non-Muslims could only vote for candidates of their
own religion to fill seats reserved for minorities in the national and
provincial assemblies. But when Sudham Chand, a Hindu community
leader who had led a local campaign in Sindh to oppose this system, was
killed in broad daylight, Ramesh Lal, a member of the National Assembly,
was prompted to comment that the restoration of the conventional
electoral system was of little use if the minorities lacked security.39 An
All-Pakistan Minorities Alliance (APMA) was formed in 2002 in response
to problems faced by minorities groups such as Christians, Ahmadis and
Hindus. Other more specific organizations, such as the Pakistan Hindu
Welfare Association (PHWA) and coalitions of Hindu panchayats (local
councils of community elders) also became more active in local politics.
But by the mid-2000s, frustrated at their lack of representation in the
PHWA, a number of Dalit organizations had come together, including
the Pakistan Dalit Forum, the Scheduled Castes Federation of Pakistan
and the Pakistan Dalit Solidarity Network. Indeed, Dalit representatives

36
On 4 January 2011, Taseer was assassinated at Kohsar Market in Islamabad by his
bodyguard Mumtaz Qadri, who disagreed with Taseer’s concerns about the
implementation of Pakistan’s existing blasphemy law.
37
Rimsha Masih v. Station House Officer, Police Station Ramna, PLD 2013 Islamabad,
www.ihc.gov.pk/Announcements/Judgements/Court1/W.P.%203172-Q-2012.pdf
(accessed December 2018). Following her acquittal, Rimsha and her family were given
permanent residency in Canada on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.
38
Faruqi, A Question of Faith, p. 19.
39
‘Hindus Feel the Heat in Pakistan’, BBC News, 2 March 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/
hi/world/south_asia/6367773.stm (accessed December 2018).
270 Epilogue and Conclusion

condemned the continuing reservation of seats as illegitimate on the basis

that Musharraf’s joint selection process did not differentiate sufficiently
between caste Hindu and Dalit electorates.40
Political competition fuelled by competition for scarce resources,
rather than religious difference, goes a long way towards explaining the
rise in communal tension in Sindh. In Tharparkar, close to the border
with India, around 80 per cent of its non-Muslims (who make up over
half this district’s population) are low caste or Dalit Meghwars, Kohlis
and Bhils. Whenever there is drought, which has now become frequent
thanks to the reduction in the flow of the Indus River and problems of
salination, these agricultural workers travel to other districts that remain
irrigated in search of food for themselves and fodder for their livestock.
There, they are employed as temporary farm workers on the lands of
powerful Muslim landlords. As Dalit rights activist Veerji Kohli
explained in 2016, ‘After a drought hits Thar Desert, these Dalits
become internally displaced people. They walk hundreds of miles with
their livestock, to find some employment as agricultural workers with a
powerful Muslim landlord. But in many cases, work is forcibly extracted
out of them; they are often not paid, and eventually, are pushed into
bonded labour’.41 Hindus in Sindh conventionally bury their dead,
rather than cremating them (a choice usually attributed to the high costs

40
Ghulam Hussain, ‘Kohli-Peasant Activism in Naon Dumbalo, Lower Sindh: creating
space for marginalized through multiple channels’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Quaid-i-
Azam University, Islamabad, 2014), p. 97. A notable exception to this pattern was the
nomination of Pakistan’s first Dalit woman senator, Krishna Kumari Kohli, by the PPP
in March 2018. ‘Born to a poor peasant, Jugno Kohli, in February 1979, Ms. Kohli and
her family members spent nearly three years in a private jail owned by the landlord of
Kunri of Umarkot district. She was a grade 3 student at the time when held captive. She
was married to Lalchand at the age of 16, when she was studying in 9th grade. However,
she pursued her studies and in 2013 she did masters in sociology from the Sindh
University. She had joined the PPP as a social activist along with her brother […] Ms.
Kohli also actively participated and worked for the rights of downtrodden people of
marginalized communities living in Thar and other areas’. See ‘Pakistan Elects Its First
Dalit Woman Senator’, The Hindu, 5 March 2018, www.thehindu.com/news/
international/krishna-kumari-kohli-pakistan-elects-its-first-dalit-woman-senator/
article22923550.ece (accessed December 2018).
41
Kohli was himself a bonded labourer in his childhood. After working with Mehergarh, an
educational NGO, he started pursuing the cause of bonded labour and became a
prominent human rights activist. But in 2017, he was arrested on charges of murder,
something that he and his supporters vehemently denied, blaming the allegation on a
dispute over land between Kohlis and local Muslims. According to a spokesperson for
Mehergarh, Veerji had ‘always resisted the feudal system’ and ‘when someone stands
against the powerful feudal lords, he is bound to make enemies. A fake case has been
registered against him for precisely this reason’. See ‘Caste and Captivity: Dalit Suffering
in Sindh’, Dawn, 13 March 2016, www.dawn.com/news/1244684 (accessed
December 2018).
 Epilogue and Conclusion 271

involved in cremation), but while burial was often permitted in Muslim

cemeteries in the past, more recently this practice has generated violent
responses. Following the desecration of a Hindu grave in 2013, an
official from the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research
(PILER)42 commented that this incident was based on a ‘political griev-
ance’ against the particular non-Muslim Bheel community involved, in
particular because it had voted for a rival party in that year’s general
election.43 Other controversies have included the kidnapping and con-
version of young Dalit women, who are then married to Muslim men,
often against their will. As a Hindu resident of Umerkot (Sindh) told
Mariam Faruqi in 2011, ‘Our temples are being vandalized and women
being raped. Atrocities against us are increasing day-by-day. We won’t
get permanent jobs unless we convert to Islam. In Pakistan, we are
subject to persecution and have to live our daily lives in fear’.44
Closely linked to the predicament of non-Muslims in Sindh has been the
network of civil society organizations that have coalesced around the issue
of land reforms. The Sindh Land Reform Movement (SLRM), comprising
peasant groups and concerned NGOs, was formed in 2012 to challenge
the ‘virtual serfdom’ of people working on the land in the province. At the
time of the SLRM’s founding, Sindh had the highest incidence of absolute
landlessness, with 26 per cent or two million households falling into this
category. As a result, debt-bondage was on the increase, with the precar-
iousness of peasant livelihoods badly affected by widespread flooding
across Sindh in 2010 and 2011. SLRM demands included the distribution
of state land to ‘bona fide’ haris along the lines of proprietary legislation
that was introduced in 2011 by the Punjab Government, with priority to be
given to released bonded labourers and flood-affected people including
women; and the issuing of formal land deeds to all rural residents, includ-
ing haris, wage workers and sharecroppers. In particular, the SLRM called
for an urgent review of the 1950 Sind Tenancy Act in order to bring it into
line with current conditions in the Sindhi countryside, within the mean-
time, steps were taken to compulsorily register all haris, establish hari
courts and permit agricultural workers to form associations to conduct

42
The Pakistan Institute of Labour Education & Research (PILER) was founded in
1982 by a group of concerned individuals from the trade union movement, academia
and various other professions. In 1988, it established a formally designed research and
training programme with regular workshops, courses and advocacy activities, http://
piler.org.pk/ (accessed December 2018).
43
‘Activists Protest against Desecration of Hindu Grave in Sindh’, Dawn, 10 October
2013, www.dawn.com/news/1048799 (accessed December 2018).
44
Sroop Chand Malhi, Hindu resident of Umerkot, Sindh, 2011, quoted in Faruqi, A
Question of Faith, p. 2.
272 Epilogue and Conclusion

collective bargaining on their behalf.45 Member organizations include

the Pakistan Fisher Folk Forum46, a registered civil society body formally
founded in 1998 to work for the advancement of social, economic,
cultural and political rights of fisherfolk and peasants more broadly in
Pakistan, and the Bhangar Hari Sangat, which works to end the iniqui-
tous practice of bonded labour in Sindh.47 Across the border, in rural
areas of India, landless labourer movements in Telangana led to the
formation of Mahila Sanghams, which multiplied throughout the 1980s
and 1990s. And in the north Indian hill areas of Garhwal and Kumaon, a
forest protection drive developed over the same period – the Chipko
movement.

Moving on to the theme of corruption, one of the most important ways in

which the rights of the citizen was discussed in both India and Pakistan in
the late 1940s and 1950s related to the idea of administrative and
political venality. Then, the very notion of citizenship values was fre-
quently juxtaposed to the idea of the defeat of ‘old’ colonial corruption
on the one hand, and the need to maintain the values of ‘national’ service
in the future, on the other. Patriotism was a core component of the anti-
corruption rhetoric of those years. Discourses of corruption, accordingly,
in the early postcolonial period, reflected both backwards and forwards
in time. But if we accept that anti-corruption arises at particular
moments when the idea of the citizen emerges in popular debate, then
another such moment occurred much more recently in 2005, with the
passage of the Right to Information Act in India. ‘Right to Information’
(RTI) movements in present-day India continue the much older trad-
ition of investigations into local malfeasance and corruption, and have
been built upon a particular notion of outdated bureaucratic practices.
This can be seen, for instance, in the activities of workers’ movements
such as the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan since the 1990s,48 and
in pressure for exploring public accountability using citizen activism,
particularly around accessing public information.49

45
‘Sindh Land Reforms Movement (SLRM) – A Civil Society Network’, http://piler.org.pk/wp-
content/uploads/2017/03/Sindh-Land-Reforms-Movement.pdf (accessed December 2018).
46
Pakistan Fisher Folk Forum, http://pff.org.pk/ (accessed December 2018).
47
Bhangar Hari Sangat, www.endslaverynow.org/bhandar-sangat (accessed December 2018).
48
Rob Jenkins and Anne Marie Goetz, ‘Accounts and Accountability: Theoretical
Implications of the Right-to-Information Movement in India’, Third World Quarterly
20, 3 (1999), pp. 603–22.
49
Anne Marie Goetz and Rob Jenkins, ‘Hybrid Forms of Accountability: Citizen
Engagement in Institutions of Public Sector Over-Sight in India’, Public Management
Review 3, 3 (2001), pp. 363–83.
 Epilogue and Conclusion 273

The notion of the ‘citizen’ that appears in these movements, especially

since the launching of national-level protests, has linked the local with
the national too, in ways that are not unlike those of the early years of
independent India and Pakistan. Since 2005, most Indian political
parties have included an anti-corruption plank in their manifestos and
from 2012, a new political party was built explicitly on its agendas – the
Aam Aadmi (Common Man) Party (AAP) – fixed on the idea of the
‘ordinary’ citizen. Arvind Kejriwal, its leader, styled himself as a
‘common man’ in his dress (the widespread customary use of a head-
scarf ) and in the party icon of the broom (with which to sweep the state
clean). Kejriwal also expressed this ‘common-ness’ in his critique of the
larger nexus between administration or politics and business. This
latter critique, too, had its origins in the early post-Independence anti-
corruption critiques within the Congress party. During both phases – the
late 1940s/early 1950s and in contemporary India, as Jonathan Parry has
argued – the very fact that anti-corruption protest surfaced, despite
the apparent ubiquity of the phenomenon, suggests the long-standing
internalization of citizenship values.50 These values, as we have argued in
Boundaries of Belonging, developed through the emergent phase of Indian
and Pakistani citizenship, in which large-scale frameworks of civic values
were key. These were also inherently relational ideas, in which contacts
between citizens and the state (or ‘aam log’ to coin the contemporary
phrase) made repeated reference to minority communities belonging to
the other state. In both places, importantly, they involved an implicit
critique of the state, from a position of ‘ordinariness’ that connected back
to a shared anti-colonial heritage. Since the 2000s, a range of NGOs have
drawn on this heritage by critiquing levels of criminality in India’s polit-
ical institutions – the National Alliance of People’s Movements, the
Narmada Bachao Andolan and the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan
among others. In UP, one of the most important grassroots movements
that picked up on this trend – Asha Parivar – was led by Sandeep Pandey
and worked to extend the idea of ordinary citizenry questioning the
actions of local governments through the RTI mechanism.51 Most prom-
inently, the pressure from Anna Hazare for a Jan Lok Pal (Ombudsman)
Bill since 2009 has similarly drawn upon Gandhian ideas with which to
critique the state at its base, albeit with authoritarian undertones.

50
Jonathan Parry, ‘The “Crises of Corruption” and “The Idea of India”: A Worm’s-Eye
View’, in The Morals of Legitimacy, ed. Italo Pardo (New York and Oxford: Berghahn
Books, 2000), pp. 27–55.
51
For more details on the work of Sandeep Pandey and Asha Parivar, see http://
ashaparivar.org (accessed December 2018).
274 Epilogue and Conclusion

Pakistan, like its neighbour, has huge problems with corruption, and
this has prompted a range of local and national responses as in India. In
2011, for instance, there were protest actions that struck observers as
closely resembling the tactics pursued by Hazare. In one case, Raja
Jehangir Akhtar promised to undertake a fast-unto-death against corrup-
tion and high defence expenditure, while another human rights activist
Ansar Burney launched a protest against terrorism and corruption. As
press reporting observed,
Both … draw strength from the popular sentiment displayed in India against
corruption. Demanding a Jan Lokpal Bill for Pakistan, Mr. Akhtar [had] decided
to set his goalposts exactly the way Anna Hazare decides for his campaign. ‘If
Anna Saheb decides on a particular timeline and gives Parliament a certain
number of days to enact the law, I will also do the same,’ he said.

Striking a note of caution, however, commentators also expressed fears

that anti-corruption movements of this kind were vulnerable to being
hijacked by the religious right. As a 2011 blog entitled ‘Let Us Build
Pakistan’ duly reminded its readers,
These surges are destined to fell prey in the hands of the far-right that seize the
moment by hijacking the zeal. The most glaring example in Pakistan is the fate of
the so-called movement for restoration of judiciary. The same judiciary that once
was a beacon of hope has gone overboard in giving the clean chit to convicted
terrorists and publically castigating the notion of secularism whilst undermining
the supremacy of the elected Parliament. These lawyers who once were pioneers
of the movement have been found showering roses upon a self-confessed killer.52
The ‘killer’ referenced here was Mumtaz Qadri, the guard-turned-
murderer of Salman Taseer mentioned earlier, and the ‘judiciary’ were
those lawyers who defended his violent actions. Pressure from lawyers,
however, has proved particularly politicized in twenty-first-century Paki-
stan. The ‘Lawyers’ Movement’, also known as the ‘Movement for the
Restoration of Judiciary’ or the ‘Black Coat Protests’, was a popular mass
protest initiated in response to Pervez Musharraf’s suspension of the
chief justice of the Pakistan Supreme Court Iftikhar Muhammad
Chaudhry in March 2007. Following his suspension, the Supreme Court
Bar Association (SCBA) declared Chaudhry’s removal to be an assault
on the independence of judiciary. The protest, which snowballed to
include political parties that arguably jumped onto its bandwagon, cul-
minated in a ‘Long March’ from Karachi to Islamabad in 2009, which

52
‘Pakistan Keenly Watches India’s Anti-Corruption Movement’, The Hindu,
24 August 2011, www.thehindu.com/news/international/pakistan-keenly-watches-
indias-anticorruption-movement/article2393164.ece (accessed December 2018).
 Epilogue and Conclusion 275

eventually persuaded the PPP government to reinstate Chaudhry. Cor-

ruption, more generally, has become a convenient means of censuring
political opponents, the most recent (at time of writing) senior politician
to be convicted being former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif who was
sentenced in absentia by a Pakistani anti-corruption court in July 2018;
a much earlier high-profile case was that of the imprisonment for corrup-
tion of Asif Ali Zardari between 1996 and 2004. Indeed, the reference to
‘justice’ (insaaf) in the name of Imran Khan’s political party Tehreek-i-
Insaaf points to the centrality of corruption and anti-corruption in public
rhetoric and debate.53

The development of women’s movements in South Asia, and in particu-

lar the influence of third-wave feminism as part of a global phenomenon
from the 1970s, is too vast a subject to be explored here. All the same, it
is possible to examine some of the long-term trends that emerged,
specifically, from the popular and grassroots attempts to promote
women’s legal rights shortly after Independence in India and Pakistan.
One of the most important periods of change in women’s movements in
both countries has been the development from the 1980s of what could
be described as ‘women’s activism’, focussed on political as well as social
and religio-legal issues. Perhaps the most enduring area of rights
demands revolved around the promotion in India of a Uniform Civil
Code (UCC), following on from the inadequacies of the Hindu Code
Bill, and also (as far as supporters of the Hindu right parties are con-
cerned) continued customary practices exercised by Muslim Personal
Law, such as tin talak.54 This particular campaign, within which a range

53
‘Saaf ’ in Urdu means ‘clean’, sending additional subliminal messages perhaps about
Imran Khan’s purported mission to clean up Pakistani life.
54
Tin talak allowed men to precipitately announce a divorce from a woman using the
simple verbal utterance of ‘I divorce you’ three times. The practice was legally banned in
Pakistan in 1961 with the introduction of the Muslim Family Law Ordinances under
Ayub Khan. See Freeland Abbott, ‘Pakistan’s New Marriage Law: A Reflection of
Qur’Anic Interpretation’, Asian Survey 1, 11 (January 1962), pp. 26–32; Lucy Carroll,
‘The Muslim Family Laws Ordinance, 1961: Provisions and Procedures – A Reference
Paper for Current Research’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 13, 1 (1979), pp. 117–43;
Sana Khan, ‘Women and State Laws and Policies in Pakistan: The Early Phase,
1947–77’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 74 (2013), pp. 726–33; Matthew
Nelson, ‘Inheritance Unbound: The Politics of Personal Law Reform in Pakistan and
India’, in Comparative Constitutional Traditions in South Asia, eds. Sunil Khilnani, Vikram
Raghavan and Arun Thiruvengadam (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012),
pp. 219–46.
276 Epilogue and Conclusion

of complex sociolegal arrangements have been debated,55 has led to the

somewhat paradoxical theoretical ‘alliance’ between women’s move-
ments and the Hindu right – the latter also pushing for a uniform code,
as part of its broader majoritarian programme. Such developments relate,
historically, to the range of movements that were generated around the
Muslim Women’s (Right to Protection on Divorce) Bill, introduced in
the Lok Sabha in 1986. In terms of the Constitution, there are
also apparently conflicting provisions: on the one hand, Articles 14–15
suggest equality and non-discrimination, and Articles 25–28 protect
religious freedom and cultural plurality; on the other, Article 44 suggests
that the Uniform Code can be a Directive Principle of State Policy.
Because of the means by which the Hindu right has used the UCC since
the mid-1990s, many women’s movements have abandoned their own
demand for it.56
In Pakistan, Zia ul Haq’s Islamization initiatives during the late 1970s
and 1980s had an undeniably negative though differential impact on the
lives, and status, of Pakistani women. While some strongly supported
his reforms, many others protested at the inequality vis-à-vis men imple-
mented by his regime’s legal changes. Despite a handful of high-profile
appointments, steps towards institutional-building for women’s develop-
ment (the establishment of a Women’s Division in the Cabinet), a
commission enquiry into the status of women in Pakistan and the inclu-
sion of a chapter on ‘women in development’ in the country’s Sixth Five-
Year Plan (1983–8), women’s rights declined overall during the Zia
period. His government’s promotion of pardah (female seclusion)
imposed a more restrictive dress code on women operating in the public
sphere, requiring them to cover their heads with a duputta (scarf ). But
the main focus for protest was the impact of Islamization on the country’s
penal code. The All-Pakistan Women’s Association (APWA), still led by
Begum Liaquat Ali Khan, together with the Women’s Action Forum
(WAF) – which attracted support from younger, arguably more radical
but still mostly from elite families, urban-based and well-educated
women – objected vociferously. WAF was set up in Karachi in 1981 in
response to the first sentence of death by stoning and public whipping
handed down to a couple under the 1979 Zina Ordinance, though many
of its leading members had existing links to Shirkatgarh, the women’s

55
Werner Menski, ‘The Uniform Civil Code Debate in Indian Law: New Developments
and Changing Agenda’, German Law Journal 9, 3 (2008), pp. 211–50.
56
Flavia Agnes, ‘The Supreme Court, the Media and the Uniform Civil Code Debate in
India’, in The Crisis of Secularism in India, eds. Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and
Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 294–9.
 Epilogue and Conclusion 277

rights organization that had been formed in 1975 in response to the

launch of the UN’s Decade for Women (1975–85).
In many ways, Karachi’s Star newspaper, until then known primarily
for covering entertainment stories, became the voice of the women’s
movement, with leading female journalists such as Najma Babar and
Najma Sadeque frequently reporting on women’s rights and challenges
to their political status on its pages. Though activists themselves rejected
the claim, many people both inside and outside Pakistan regarded WAF
as spearheading the challenge against Zia’s policies. The new laws of
evidence proposed in 1983 – ‘Qanun-i-Shahadat (Law of Evidence)
Order’, according to which the evidence of one man would be equal to
two women – were trenchantly rejected by women of all classes who took
to the streets in protest and ended up badly beaten by police and tear-
gassed during rallies such as those held in Lahore in February that year.
Even though these actions did not lead to the total repeal of the Hudood
Ordinances, they succeeded in bringing about a partial retreat on the part
of the authorities, and acknowledgement of women’s position as citizens
within an Islamic state. In 1984 Zia’s regime was forced to substitute its
initial legislation with a different version that restricted Islamic rules
regarding the unequal giving of evidence to financial and maximum
punishment hudud cases only.57
In India, this period witnessed growing public perception about the
divide between the legal enactment of women’s rights and their imple-
mentation, a gulf that was most strongly seen in cases of dowry deaths
and rape. Legal protections for women continue to be routinely trans-
gressed around a wide array of rape categories: ‘landlord rape’ or violent
forms of droit de seigneur; rape by men in positions of occupation
authority; ‘caste rape’; and class, police and army rape. The failure of
formal legal mechanisms to remedy these problems led to a shift (again in
the 1980s) from mass protests around legislative change, to the develop-
ment of women’s centres to assist in individual cases of social welfare and
domestic abuse. The most well-known examples of this response was
Saheli (‘Beloved Friend’), the Delhi women’s organization set up in

57
Farida Shaheed and Khawar Mumtaz, ‘Islamisation and Women: The Experience of
Pakistan’, New Blackfriars 71, 835, Special Issue: The World of Islam (February 1990),
pp. 67–80; Asthma Jehangir and Hina Jilani, The Hudood Ordinances: A Divine Sanction
(Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications, 2003); Afshan Jafar, ‘Women, Islam and the State
in Pakistan’, Gender Issues 22, 1 (December 2003), pp. 35–55; Fawzia Afzal-Khan,
‘Betwixt and Between? Women, the Nation and Islamization in Pakistan’, Social
Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 13, 1 (2007), pp. 19–29;
Amina Jamal, ‘When Are Women’s Rights Human Rights in Pakistan?’, in Gender,
National Security and Counter-Terrorism: Human Rights Perspectives, eds. Margaret
Satterthwaite and Jayne Huckerby (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 208–29.
278 Epilogue and Conclusion

1983 and extended to other cities, which hosted workshops, some of

which also promoted women’s creativity, association and discussion of
political and social issues that concerned them.58
The significance of these later movements was how they triggered
other, broader fronts for women’s rights, both among Indian feminists
and in specific areas of government activity. For instance, government-
sponsored Mahila Mandals were rejuvenated as a result of the problems
publicized by Chipko, and a range of other social agitations, such as anti-
alcohol movements, were set up. In addition, the issues facing women
overall were more clearly interconnected within these movements –
linking the conditions of work to broader questions about the nature of
women’s role in families, levels of women’s education and the role of
children. These thematic networks operating in women’s movements, we
would argue, had already been implicit in much earlier manifestations of
citizen’s mobilizations centred around the rights of women in South Asia
in the early post-Independence years. At different levels, we have also
seen early forms of vernacularization taking place in the concept of rights
of citizens, which foreshadowed later movements, particularly among
women.59 Other rights movements have learned from the experiences
of the women’s movement – for example, the disability rights movement.
This did not manage to establish, however, the same kind of grassroots
presence and internal lobbying compared to other movements, and
instead was eventually driven by international pressure on the govern-
ment to pass the Persons with Disabilities Act of 1995.60
In Pakistan the status of women similarly remains a highly contested
issue. The Women’s Protection Bill (WPB) of 2006 was an attempt to
amend the heavily criticized 1979 Hudood Ordinance laws that still
governed the punishment for rape and adultery in Pakistan. Critics of
the Hudood Ordinance alleged that it made it exceptionally difficult and
dangerous to prove an allegation of rape, and thousands of women had
been imprisoned as a result. The 2006 WPB transferred a number of
offences back from the Zina Ordinance to the Pakistan Penal Code
(where they had been located before 1979), and removed whipping and
amputation as punishments for adultery. In short, this law meant women

58
Radha Kumar, The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s
Rights and Feminism in India, 1800–1990 (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1993),
pp. 143–5.
59
Peggy Levitt and Sally Merry, ‘Vernacularization on the Ground: Local Uses of Global
Women’s Rights in Peru, China, India and the United States’, Global Networks 9, 4
(October 2009), pp. 441–61.
60
Nilika Mehrotra, ‘Disability Rights Movements in India’, Economic and Political Weekly
46, 6 (5–11 February 2011), pp. 65–72.
 Epilogue and Conclusion 279

would not be jailed if they were unable to prove rape, and it also allowed
rape to be proven on grounds other than witness testimony, such as
forensics and DNA evidence.61 Other more recent ‘female-friendly’
legislation has included the Acid Control and Acid Crime Prevention
Act and the Prevention of Anti-Women Practices Act, both passed
in 2011.
In terms of women’s political representation, the debates of the first
decade after Independence still reverberate. With the advent of martial
law in 1958, and the suspension of the 1956 Constitution, female suf-
frage on the basis of women’s territorial constituencies was abolished.
Then, under Ayub Khan’s 1962 constitutional re-working, three seats for
women in each of the two wings of the country (East and West Pakistan)
were introduced for a period of ten years, though these, like the other
300 members of the National Assembly, were chosen indirectly by an
electoral college made up of ‘Basic Democrats’. Yahya Khan’s Legal
Framework Order of 1970 maintained the principle of reserved seats,
this time with seven for women of East Pakistan and six for those in West
Pakistan, and the same pattern continued under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
when Pakistan’s 1973 Constitution included ten reserved seats for
women. Later, in 1985, under Zia this total was raised to twenty. The
occupants of these reserved seats, however, like their predecessors, were
not elected directly but were chosen through a voting process conducted
in the already-elected National Assembly.
After the 1988 elections, the constitutional provision, which sanc-
tioned this affirmative action on the part of the state, lapsed. However,
prior to elections in 2002 Musharraf revived reserved seats for women,
returning the number to twenty. By the time of the 2008 polls, this total
had been increased to sixty. In the meanwhile, though many Pakistani
women experienced practical difficulties in exercising their right to vote
due to family and/or community pressures, the number of women stand-
ing for general seats increased, with sixty-four candidates contesting in
2008, of whom approximately 25 per cent proved successful.62 The
inclusion of Pakistan ‘hidden’ transgender population in the 2017 census
and the first-ever proposed transgender law were viewed by sympathetic
supporters as positive developments, but minorities – women, non-
Muslims and transgender people – continued to experience violent

61
Martin Lau, ‘Twenty-Five Years of Hudood Ordinances – A Review’, Washington and
Lee Law Review 64, 4 (2007), pp. 1291–314.
62
Shahbana Shamaas Gul Khattak and Akhtar Hussain, ‘Women Representation in
Pakistani Legislatures: A Study of the 2002, 2008 and 2013 General Elections’, South
Asia Survey 20, 2 (2016), pp. 191–205.
280 Epilogue and Conclusion

attacks, discrimination and government persecution, with human rights

organizations criticizing the Pakistani authorities for failing to provide
adequate protection for these citizens and their rights.

As this epilogue has underlined, while the political frameworks oper-

ating in India and Pakistan have not been identical, there are parallels
between the developments that challenge the working of democracy in
India and the ‘failed state’ narrative that dominates assessments of the
challenges faced by twenty-first-century Pakistanis. Unlike India,
however, Pakistan had ‘ideology’ in the form of religion as the official
rationale for its creation: as Tahir Kamran has argued, while Jinnah’s
ambition for Pakistan was based on the principle of ‘one nation, one
culture, one language’, in reality ‘the repetitive expression of the
Hindu as the other’, together with the emphasis on one particular
language Urdu, was tightly woven into Pakistani identity and politics
from the outset, generating huge challenges for those Pakistani citi-
zens who did not fit this patriotically approved national template.63
However, the presumed knock-on negative effects of this ‘collective
failure’ have demonstrated, according to Ian Talbot, that ‘language
and religion, rather than providing a panacea for unity in a plural
society, have opened a Pandora’s box of conflicting identities’.64
Again, unlike India, whose 1950 Constitution remains intact (despite
a succession of amendments that have rewritten large amounts of
what it originally contained), Pakistanis – should they ever wish to
do so – can pick and choose from three Constitutions and a ‘Legal
Framework Order’ when it comes to framing their current demands
for political reform. With Pakistan now a very different territorial
space compared to when it was created, it is the 1973 Constitution
(rather than its 1956 forerunner) that has been the focus of discussion
since the turn of the twenty-first century.65 In particular, the 18th
Amendment passed during Asif Ali Zardari’s PPP presidency in April
2010, which among other changes removed the power of the president to
dissolve Parliament unilaterally, also rebalanced the relationship between

63
Tahir Kamran, ‘Islam, Urdu and Hindu as the Other: Instruments of Cultural
Homogeneity in Pakistan’, in Composite Culture in a Multicultural Society, eds. Bipen
Chandra and Sucheta Mahajan (Delhi: Pearson, 2007), p. 97.
64
Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A Modern History (London: C. Hurst and Co., 1999), p. 1.
65
For modifications of the 1973 Constitution up to 2012, see http://na.gov.pk/uploads/
documents/1333523681_951.pdf (accessed December 2018). Sadaf Aziz, The
Constitution of Pakistan: A Contextual Analysis (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2018).
 Epilogue and Conclusion 281

centre and provinces.66 For Shahid Javed Burki, writing in 2010, there was
little doubt that
the 18th Amendment [was going to have] a profound impact on the way the
country is governed and its economy is managed. If the federating – the
provinces – receive additional powers as a result of the abolition of the
concurrent list put into the 1973 constitution by its framers, it will mean
transferring large amounts of economic authority to the provinces.67
Whether its critics view it quite so optimistically over a decade later is
debatable.68
As the first quotation at the start of this epilogue suggests, there have
also been recent suggestions in India that changes to the Constitution are
not beyond the pale, in the context of a regime that is transforming all
manner of state institutions. The key political pressure, since the election
of Narendra Modi’s BJP government and the significant denudation of
Congress authority in 2014, has been the repeated questioning of the
‘secular’ basis of the state. This is felt perhaps nowhere more strongly
than in UP itself, especially following the election in March 2017 of the
BJP hardliner, Yogi Adityanath, on a platform against the ‘appeasement’
of Muslims, and the need to ‘crack down’ on caste-based politics and
‘corruption’. In his election speeches, Adityanath used the undiluted
rhetoric of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS): ‘I will not stop
until I have turned India and UP into a Hindu Rashtra [state]’; calling
for the installation of Hindu deities in Muslim mosques; the building of
the ‘world’s largest’ statue of Lord Ram; and claiming in ‘post-truth’
fashion that thanks to ‘pseudo-secularism’ Hindus are in demographic
decline.69 Just as in the early post-Independence years, there is now not
much ambiguity in parts of UP that Muslims are expected to live, largely,
as second-class citizens under fear of their security. The results have been
the wider acquiescence in lynchings of Muslims, especially around the

66
Other new features that were introduced into the Pakistan Constitution included the
following: the North-West Frontier Province was renamed Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa; the
ban on third-time prime ministership and chief ministership was lifted; and suspending
the constitution was now made tantamount to high treason.
67
Shahid Javed Burki, ‘The 18th Amendment: Pakistan’s Constitution Redesigned’,
Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, Working Paper
No. 112, 3 September 2010, www.files.ethz.ch/isn/120842/ISAS_Working_Paper_112_-
_Email_-_The_18_Amendment_06092010121427.pdf (accessed December 2018).
68
See ‘Questions about 18th Amendment’, 9 February 2017, https://pakobserver.net/
questions-about-18th-amendment/ (accessed December 2018).
69
Harsh Mander, ‘Yogi Adityanath Is as Much a Creation of the So-Called Secular
Parties as of the Sangh’, Scroll.in, 21 March 2017, https://scroll.in/article/832292/
adityanath-is-as-much-a-creation-of-the-so-called-secular-parties-as-the-sangh-parivar
(accessed December 2018).
282 Epilogue and Conclusion

issue of cows and the work of butchers. Arguably, parties of all complex-
ions have benefitted from both the rhetoric of ‘secularism’ (rather than its
serious implementation),70 and the strategic use of communal vio-
lence.71 However, we have suggested, from India’s first decade, the same
need for new kinds of political repertoires by marginalized ethnic and
religious groups in India when lobbying the state indicates the long-term
fragility of Indian secularism’s constitutional basis.
Ethnicity with its linkages to provincial identity and language, rather
than caste divisions, has proved to be one of Pakistan’s most exposed
‘Achilles heels’. This was demonstrated most dramatically in the devel-
opments that led to East Pakistan becoming Bangladesh in 1971, but
ethnic tension has also characterized relations between communities,
and between provincial and federal political leaders in provinces of
former West Pakistan. In Sindh, friction between the various commu-
nities brought together in the province by Partition was made more
complicated by the internal southwards migration of Punjabis and Pash-
tuns seeking employment there. Sindhis (who even before Independence
had been sensitive to the presence of outsiders in ‘their’ province) saw
themselves as increasingly marginalized from power (whether in relation
to civilian politics, the sway of the bureaucracy or the dominance exer-
cised by the military), and they associated Urdu-speaking migrants –
muhajirs – as well as other migrant communities living in ‘their’ province
with the priorities and plans of the country’s increasingly Punjab-
dominated federal authorities. Many Sindhis had quickly come to believe
that their language and the cultural heritage that went with it were under
threat. In the early 1970s, language turned into a dangerous bone of
contention, echoing earlier resentment of Urdu in East Pakistan in the
1950s and 1960s. In July 1972, the provincial PPP ministry, led by
Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, introduced the ‘Teaching, Promotion and Use of
Sindhi Language Bill’, which made Sindhi into the province’s sole official
language: alongside Urdu Sindhi was made a compulsory subject for
school pupils up to Class 12. This legislation also raised the prospect of
government employees having to learn Sindhi within a stipulated period
and so it challenged Urdu’s (by then) established place in government
offices and the law courts. Urdu speakers took to the streets to protest
vehemently in defence of their linguistic interests and, as one Urdu

70
Ibid.
71
Ibid. State governments have done little in UP, for example around the resettlement and
rehabilitation of Muslims following severe rioting in Muzaffarnagar in September 2013.
See also Steven Wilkinson, Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in
India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
 Epilogue and Conclusion 283

newspaper sarcastically remarked on its front page, if the authorities

wanted to bury Urdu, then they really needed to do it in style (Urdu ka
janaza hai zara dhoom se nikle). In riots that followed, lives were lost and
properties torched in urban centres where Urdu-speaking muhajirs lived,
such as Karachi, Hyderabad, Sukkur, Mirpurkhas, Nawabshah and
Larkana. Pro-Sindhi activists belonging to G. M. Sayed’s Sindhi nation-
alist movement, Jiye Sindh Mahaz (Long Live Sindh Movement) joined
the fray, making bonfires of Urdu newspapers and defacing portraits of
the national – Urdu-writing – poet, Iqbal. Sindh Sujag Jathas (‘Sindh
Awakening Squads’) carried Jiye Sindh’s message into rural areas. From
a Sindhi nationalist perspective, there were clear parallels between
Sindh’s position and events in East Bengal that had resulted in the drama
of Bangladesh’s bitterly fought secession.72
This ‘ethnic’ unrest was eventually contained, but in 1973 muhajir
fears were again raised by the introduction of a new federal quota system
for government employment, which split Sindh’s share of just less than
20 per cent into two parts – rural (11.4 per cent) and urban (7.6 per
cent). As Sindhis largely fell into the first category and muhajirs into
the second, many Urdu speakers believed that this measure threatened
all-important access to government jobs, even though this was a sector
of (secure) employment within which they had been arguably over-
represented since Pakistan’s creation. By the end of 1970s, around
50 per cent of the inhabitants of Karachi were Urdu speakers, with a
further 13 per cent speaking Punjabi, and only around 7 per cent speak-
ing Sindhi.73 By 1981, Urdu speakers accounted for 61 per cent of
Karachi’s population. That number-crunching continues to dominate
politics in Sindh was highlighted by the long-awaited 2017 national
census, which its critics believed severely under-counted the city’s popu-
lation as a tactic to preserve the ruling Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz
(PML-N) power base ahead of general elections to be held in 2018.
Farooq Sattar, chief of Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) that had
ruled Karachi and urban Sindh for decades, termed the early results
‘a great injustice’: ‘The census has been rigged If we are counted less,
then our seats in parliament will remain the same [instead of being

72
For more discussion about muhajir responses to political developments in Sindh politics,
see Oskar Verkaaik, Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Nichola Khan, Mohajir Militancy in
Pakistan (London: Routledge, 2012); and Laurent Gayer, Karachi: Ordered Disorder and
the Struggle for the City (London: C. Hurst and Co., 2014).
73
It should be added, however, that many of the city’s pre-Partition inhabitants had
actually spoken Kutchi, a language claimed as a dialect by both Gujarati and Sindhi.
284 Epilogue and Conclusion

increased]’, he told reporters in Karachi.74 Add to this, ongoing debates

about the rights of long-settled Afghan refugees, and the connections
between ethnic identity and citizenship in twenty-first-century Pakistan
appear even more complex.

So, to sum up, in Boundaries of Belonging we have explored how, despite

the violence and displacement of Partition, and in some cases because of
it, societies in newly independent India and Pakistan alike articulated a
popular politics of citizenship. Ideas of belonging, however, were not
generally expressed through texts comprising coherent ideologies, but
rather via direct and active engagement with different forms of political
and civic life, some of which we have set out through the course of this
book: engagement with large-scale state ceremonies of symbolic import-
ance, refugee rehabilitation, property and housing, the control and
movement of goods and food supplies, the exercise of voting and the
promotion of specific group rights. Alongside the topics that we have
investigated in Boundaries of Belonging there are others, such as those
relating to business and finance, religious foundations, labour practices,
education and new publishing or intellectual enterprises, which we have
deliberately not pursued, but which suggest that our chosen modes of
civic assertion were not the only important forms in this period of
transition and ‘nation-building’. Our focus has also been primarily on
urban contexts, and on themes in which the relationship between regions
on each side of the border was direct and explicit, since we argue that this
inter-regional/international relationship was crucial to the substantive
formation of citizenship ideas in both countries. Overall, we believe that
our inter-regional study presents a number of new ways of thinking about
citizenship in South Asia.
First, we have considered how far the rights of and the concepts
surrounding the ‘citizen’ in both India and Pakistan were affected
by what was happening across the new border in the years following
Independence and Partition. Since the idea of the citizen presupposed
association with a nation state, it was always articulated in relation to
other spaces beyond the boundaries of that state, especially those places
that had mutually symmetrical meanings for citizens in both places. We
have found, therefore, not just similarities between cities in Sindh and

74
‘Census Sparks Political Row over Growth in Major Cities’, The News, 29 August 2017,
www.thenews.com.pk/latest/226860-Census-sparks-political-row-over-growth-in-
major-cities (accessed December 2018).
 Epilogue and Conclusion 285

UP, but also mutually constituted ideas about, and movements sur-
rounding, the ‘citizen’. For instance, as Chapters 2 and 3 explored, both
localities experienced a range of popular protests around the problems of
food and civil supply or rationing in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But
these widespread concerns were strongly related to commonly held ideas
about bureaucratic changes brought about by Partition-related migra-
tion, by problems of international corruption (not least smuggling) and
by questions surrounding minority enjoyment of resources, among
groups associated with the ‘other’ state.
Second, given that the framework for Boundaries of Belonging has been
about the inter-relationship of specific places on each side of the Indo-
Pakistan border, in which citizenship was not necessarily expressed in a
textual discourse, but by forms of action and engagement, the level of the
locality has been our main focus. Prioritizing this approach has allowed
us to begin to re-think the spatial scales of citizenship’s everyday mean-
ings, exploring not simply ideas of rights/belonging to nations, but also
how ideas about the relations between particular cities or regions and
their respective nations played out. Our new citizens, whether Indian or
Pakistani, constantly navigated these spatial scales, and, in many ways,
the very differences between promises issued from the centre and the
realities of the locality could shift, colour and even undermine some of
the formal principles of citizenship as these took shape. For instance, we
looked at the promises of new supposedly responsive public services and
servants at a national level, and the realities of engagement with the
administration in particular locations. We also examined the very specific
problems of refugees and housing at the level of an individual city or
town, alongside the larger politics of bilateral international agreements
about rehabilitation. In our later chapters, we similarly explored connec-
tions between local rights movements, especially for women, and their
links to larger national and international themes regarding the political
rights of women. We have considered another dimension of scale too. In
our specific discussion of developments taking place in UP and Sindh,
we have sought to extend, again spatially, the correlation between
Partition’s conditions and citizenship outcomes, and take this beyond
engaging with the immediate spheres of Partition violence, principally
the Punjab and Bengal. This regional extension for us is crucial for
considering the wider resonance of the mid-twentieth-century processes
of decolonization taking place across South Asia as a whole, albeit by
focussing on one specific intersection of regions.
Third, it follows from this configuration of citizenship that rights
associated with it were in no sense ‘certain’ or ‘a given’, and, importantly,
that this uncertainty could change over time. As a number of exclusions
286 Epilogue and Conclusion

have shown globally, in relation to Commonwealth/postcolonial commu-

nities in European countries, or with respect to migrants from other states
who have formed minorities in their new homes, ‘citizenship’ was socially
differentiated in terms of its attendant securities. It was never fully deter-
mined. As we have highlighted throughout Boundaries of Belonging, some
communities – such as Muslim groups in UP and Hindus in Sindh – were
repeatedly or intermittently excluded from the full and unambiguous
enjoyment of rights, or expressions of belonging to the nation, whether
in India or in Pakistan. This broad theme has certainly been explored
elsewhere in the immediate, messy aftermath of Partition,75 but our
book addresses these differentiated insecurities of citizenship at a more
mundane and ‘unremarkable’ level, in everyday life courses and struggles
that were not immediately connected to Partition itself.
Fourth, as Boundaries of Belonging highlights, the interconnection
between India and Pakistan during the late 1940s and 1950s was seen
perhaps most unambiguously in the ways in which both states subse-
quently managed the promises of ‘universal’ citizenship rights set against
the realities of diverse and varied group claims on them. In many ways,
however, this tension is not easily captured in most general explorations
of the concept of citizenship. This is because few studies in historical
literature have attempted to make sense of how citizenship is enacted in
day-to-day movements to claim, critique and protect rights in political
action. All the same, there have been attempts to draw out the problem of
India’s implementation of ‘liberal’ citizenship rights, and the effects of
‘closure’, to deploy Anupama Roy’s term, of such rights in reality for
certain minorities.76 In a more recent work, India’s Constitution is
presented as having ‘imbrications in everyday life’, in ways that have
led to the constant reinterpretation of the document.77 For us, however,
the notion of the citizen is not always explicitly stated. Rather it is often
indirectly articulated in struggles for resources and the symbolic capital
of ‘belonging’. In attempting to explore these complex social histories of
the emerging citizen in two interconnected sites, we find that there were
meaningful gaps between the political statement of rights and their
enjoyment or implementation in practice – from the legal position of
women, to the administration of resource distribution, and the mainten-
ance of secularism. It is in this gap, and debates about it, that the wide
array of citizens’ movements that we have encountered here mostly
appear – the movements of women, caste or adivasi organizations, or

75
Vazira Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees,
Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
76 77
Roy, Mapping Citizenship. De, A People’s Constitution, pp. 4–5.
 Epilogue and Conclusion 287

religious minorities, for instance, were all anchored in a similar set of

critiques regarding the state’s promise to implement universal rights and
the ultimate shortcomings of the formal processes surrounding that
ambition.
Last but not least, we hope that Boundaries of Belonging will encourage
rethinking about the changing modes of active popular citizenship, which
were shaped by forms of political engagement in both states in the late
1940s and 1950s. In the first five years following Independence, both
new states faced comparable public complaints regarding governance,
which were to some extent inter-related. Again, this was partly a result of
the fact that many of the complaints about corruption related to war-time
provisioning, black markets and evacuee property. In both UP and
Sindh, however, everyday problems of governance did not create a sense
of fatalism about political redress, or undermine popular belief in the
importance of representation, even though factional politics quickly
mapped onto the patronage networks of resource allocation. Accusations
of corruption/maladministration and the like did not hinder Indians and
Pakistanis from exercising, or seeking to exercise, their democratic rights.
And the fact that virtually the opposite has been the case in more recent
decades tell us something interesting about the idea of a ‘crisis of gov-
ernance’ in the region more generally. In a larger sense, we argue that
some popular movements took the concept of civic assertion into their
own hands, emulating what sociologists have seen in other contexts of
mass displacement – namely, innovative and makeshift citizenship
responses to rapidly changing circumstances.78
What this citizenship complex shows is that written bills of rights,
expressed in the form of national constitutions, are living documents in
ways that are perhaps different in our two states, especially when com-
pared to other contexts. Most written constitutions are incomplete,
continually amended and reworked; there is nothing usual here as far
as India and Pakistan are concerned, though clearly their respective
constitutional ‘stories’ have not been identical. But, at the same time,
the Indian and Pakistani constitutions possess very specific and contin-
gent meanings for different communities, not least in India, where some
groups simultaneously employ strategies drawing on its constitution’s
fundamental principles and promises of rights to particular defined cat-
egories of citizen. Moreover, the recourse to constitutional documents
for promoting or defending rights is currently of great urgency in both
states, not least because of inherent political threats to their content, or

78
James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
288 Epilogue and Conclusion

because of their political fragility. In the case of Pakistan, this has been
based on a certain form of majoritarianism that pivots largely on the
balance (or imbalance) between provinces, and their relationship to the
centre, at times inflected by religion. In the case of India, it is related to
different expressions of majoritarianism, sometimes based in caste or
alternatively its denial, and sometimes founded on the inherent weakness
of secularism within the state, as the demonization (or simple marking)
of religious minorities intermittently becomes the key process in
creating the normative citizen and broader understandings of political
‘belonging’. Either way, in twenty-first-century South Asia, citizenship
and rights remain as central to contingent understandings and continu-
ing debates about what it means to belong to a place as they proved to be
in the decade following Independence and Partition.
 Glossary

aam aadmi ordinary man

aam log ordinary people
abadgar constructor, developer
abwab agricultural levy
adivasi original (tribal) inhabitant
alim (pl. ulama), a learned man, typically a
man learned in Islamic legal and religious
studies
anjuman association (Muslim)
Anjuman-i Khawateen- Association of Muslim Women
i Islam
Anjuman-i Tahafuuz Association for the Protection of
Huqooq-i Niswan Women’s Rights
Anjuman-i-Taraqqi-i- Association for the Advancement
Urdu of Urdu
Arya Samaj Hindu social reform movement
Awami Mahaz People’s Front
badmash criminal
bania Hindu merchant
batai crop sharing
begar forced labour
begum honorific title for a Muslim woman
bhai-bandi (lit. fraternity) nepotism
Bhil Scheduled Tribe in India and Pakistan
bidi cigarette
Bint-i-Pakistan daughter of Pakistan
chehlum Muslim mourning ceremony
chhatank measurement of weight, c. 50 grams
crore 10,000,000
dargah shrine of a religious figure, usually
Sufi-connected
Dar-ul-Ulum religious seminary (Muslim)
289
290 Glossary

dharamshala building devoted to religious or

charitable purposes, especially a rest
house for travellers
Dharma Chakra wheel of cosmic order
Dharwar Mahamila Women’s organization
Mandal
duputta scarf
Eid ul Azha important stage in the annual Hajj or
pilgrimage to Mecca
Eid ul Fitr celebration marking the end of Ramadan
Eidgah Maidan ground where communal Eid prayers
are held
fateha khawani condolence prayer meeting (Muslim)
gaddi (lit. seat, throne) Sufi shrine
gharwalas menfolk in the home
godown warehouse
goonda thug
gurdwara Sikh place of worship
halwai sweetmaker
haq/haqdaar rights
harep permanent tenancy rights
hari sharecropper peasant
Harijan ‘Children of God’, Gandhian term for
Dalit communities
Harijan Sevak Sangh Harijan Service Union
Hindi Sahitya organization devoted to the spread of the
Sammelan Hindi language
Hindu Mahasabha right-wing Hindu nationalist movement
and political party
Holi Hindu festival
hudud (lit. borders, boundaries, limits) refers to
punishments that under Islamic law
(Shariah) are mandated and fixed by God
Hukumat-i-Pakistan Government of Pakistan
insaaf justice
Jamiat-i-Muhajireen Refugee Council
Jamiat-ul-Ulama Council of Theologians
Jatava Scheduled Caste group in UP
jus sanguinis ‘right of blood’, heritable citizenship
jus soli ‘right of the soil’, birthplace-defined
citizenship
kanungo local revenue officer
 Glossary 291

khadi homespun cloth

Khaksars militant Islamic volunteer movement
based in Punjab and UP
Khawateen womankind
Khawateen-i- Women’s Association for the Spread
Anjuman-i-Tablighul of Islam
Islam
Khawateen-i-Pakistan Women of Pakistan
Kisan Mazdoor Praja Farmers’ and Peasants’ Citizen Party
Party
Kori Scheduled Caste group in UP, weavers
lakh 100,000
Lok Sabha Lower House of the Indian Parliament
lorha guarded settlement
maund measurement of weight, c. 37 kilos
Mahila Matadhikar Women’s Suffrage Conference
Samiti
Mahila Samaj Women’s Society
Mahila Sangh Women’s Union
Mataji mother
maulvi honorific religious title given to Muslim
religious scholar
mazar tomb
mofussil parts of a country outside an urban
centre; rural areas
mohalla neighbourhood of a town or city
muhajir one who migrates, a refugee (pl.
muhajarin); in the context of South Asia
someone from India who settled in
Pakistan after Partition
Muharram first month of the Islamic calendar
naib deputy
paan preparation combining betel leaf with
areca nut widely consumed throughout
South Asia for its stimulant effects
panchayat council
Pasi Dalit community, mostly agriculturalists
pir Sufi master who leads disciples along his
spiritual path
pugree interest-free security deposit given by a
tenant to a landlord
purdah female seclusion
292 Glossary

Qanun-i-Shahadat Law of Evidence

qasbah small town
qawwali singing of Muslim devotional songs,
often inducing ecstasy among listeners
Quaid-i-Azam ‘Great Leader’
Quaid-i Millat ‘Leader of the Nation’
Ramadan (Ramzan) Muslim month of fasting
rashtra state
Rashtriya militant right-wing Hindu nationalist
Swayamsevak Sangh volunteer movement
(RSS)
saheli beloved friend (female)
sajjada nashin (lit. ‘one who sits on the carpet’); head of
pir family and/or guardian of a Sufi shrine
Sansi ex-criminal tribe community
Sanyukt Kori Kori Community Joint Federation
Mahasangh
Satyagraha non-violent resistance
Seva Dal volunteer movement linked to the
Congress
Sewika Dal women’s movement linked to the
Congress
shirkatgarh lit. a place of participation
swaraj self-rule
sir land that is owned directly by the
landlord, and which is cultivated by the
landlord, or by employees and/or tenants
tahsildar revenue officer
Tehreek-i-Insaaf Justice Party
tin talak triple utterance for Muslim divorce
ulama pl. of alim
vakil legal representative
Vidhan Sabha State Assembly
vimukta jati ex-criminal tribe
Vimukt Jati Sevak Ex-Criminal Tribe Service Union
Sangh
zamindar landowner, especially one who leases his
land to tenant farmers
zamindari system under which zamindars hold land
zindabad long live!
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 Index

18th Amendment, 280 All-India Muslim Ladies’ Conference, 183

All-India Radio, 159
Aam Aadmi (Ordinary Man) Party, 273 All-India Refugee Association, 87–88
abducted women, 1–2, 12, 202, 204, 206 All-India Refugee Conference, 88
abwab, 251 All-India Save the Children Committee,
Acid Control and Acid Crime Prevention 200–201
Act, 2011, 279 All-India Scheduled Castes Federation, 241
Adityanath, Yogi, 281 All-India Women’s Conference, 183–185,
adivasis, 9, 200, 239, 261, 263, 266–267, 190–191, 193–202
286 All-India Women’s Food Council, 128
Administration of Evacuee Property Act, All-Pakistan Barbers’ Association, 120
1950, 93 All-Pakistan Confederation of Labour, 256
Administration of Evacuee Property All-Pakistan Joint Refugees Council, 78
Amendment Bill, 1952, 93 All-Pakistan Minorities Alliance, 269
Administration of Evacuee Property Bill, All-Pakistan Women’s Association
1950, 230 (APWA), 121, 202–203, 208–210,
administrative officers, 47, 49–50, 69, 101, 212, 214, 218, 276
122, 173, 176, 196, 237, 252 Alwa, Arshia, 215
suspicions surrounding, 99–101 Ambedkar, B.R., 159, 185, 198, 240, 246,
affirmative action, 265 257, 262, 267
Aga Khan, 212 Anandpur Sahib, 1–2
Agra, 128, 187, 233 Andhra Pradesh, 161, 195
Ahmad, Iqbal, 233 Anjuman Muhajir Khawateen, 218
Ahmad, Maulana Bashir, 233 Anjuman-i Khawateen-i Islam, 183
Ahmadis, 210, 268 Anjuman-i Tahafuuz Huqooq-i Niswan,
Ahmed, Begum Anwar Ghulam, 212–213, 216
215, 220 Anjuman-i-Taraqqi-i-Urdu, 214
Ahmed, Mujahid Saghir, 211 anti-corruption, 117, 123–125, 127, 260
Ahmed, Mujahid Saghir Ahmed, 211 Aram Bagh, 207, 210
Ahmedabad, 267 archives, 19
Akhtar, Raja Jehangir, 274 army, Pakistan, 25, 68, 155, 220
Alam, Manzar, 52 Arya Samaj, 90
Ali, Begum Chaudhry Mohammad, Asghar, Begum Jalil, 217
214–215 Asha Parivar, 273
Ali, Chaudhry Mohammad, 152 Association for Moral and Social Hygiene,
Aligarh, 6, 28, 100, 232, 235 193
Allahabad, 6, 27, 29, 52, 77, 96, 115, 194, austerity, 106, 110–111, 220
200–201, 266 Awami League, 218
All-India Conference of the Association of Awami League Women’s Committee, 218
Moral and Social Hygiene, 193 Azad, Jagannath, 55
All-India Congress Committee, 42, 125 Azad, Maulana Abul Kalam, 32
All-India Harijan Sevak Sangh, 241 Azamgarh, 115

308
 Index 309

Babar, Najma, 277 Bombay, 5, 27, 33, 35, 45, 55, 63, 71,
Backward and Minority Castes Employees 90, 100, 110, 123, 157, 161, 194,
Federation, 266 200–201, 227, 238
‘Backward Classes’ (BCs), 265 Bombay Mahila Sangh, 200
Backward Classes Commission, 1953, Bombay Presidency, 6
265 bonded labour, 270
Bahraich, 28, 33 Bowles, Chester, 160
Bahruddin, Agha, 174 British Commonwealth, 146–147
Bahujan Samaj Party, 266 British High Commission, 37, 61
Bajrange, Dakxin Chhara, 267 British Pathé, 37
Bakhsh, Pir Ilahi, 91, 125, 247 Budaun, 84
Bal, Mrs. Durga, 165 Budhan Theatre, 267
Banaras, 6, 33, 232 Burney, Ansar, 274
Banerji, Purnima, 201–202 Butt, Begum Wilayat, 207
Bangladesh, 268, 282–283
Bannerji, Purnima, 233 Cabinet Mission, 1946, 3
Bar Association, UP, 126 Calcutta, 5, 26, 74, 106, 123, 135, 177
Bara Banki, 28 cemeteries, 63
Bareilly, 115, 232, 235 census, 75, 138, 168–171, 225
Barisal, 231 Census Commissioner, Pakistan, 169
Basic Democrats, 279 Central Board of Film Censors, 193
Basic Principles Committtee, 1949, Central Legislative Assembly, 181, 186
150–151 Central Provinces, 197
batai, 228 Chagla, Ahmed G., 56
begar, 243 Chakravarty, R, 227
Begum, Fatimah, 208–209, 217 Chand, Puran, 242
Begum, Hajrah, 181, 194 Chand, Sudham, 269
Bengal, 7–8, 49, 51, 71, 77, 110, 119, 122, Chandra, C.N., 83–84
160–162, 175, 285 Chatterji, Shrichandra, 227
Bengal Famine, 1943, 108–109 Chattopadhyaya, S.C., 152
Bengali language, 51 Chaudhry, IIftikhar Muhammad, 274
Besant, Annie, 183 Chief Election Commissioner, 157
Bhangar Hari Sangat, 272 child marriage, 182–183
Bharatiya Dalit Panthers, 266 Child Marriage Restraint Act, 1929, 183
Bharatiya Janata Party, 260, 262, 281 children, 200–201
Bhargava, K.P., 99 China, 44
Bhargava, Mrs Sharda, 165 Chipko movement, 272, 278
Bhatti, Shahbaz, 269 Chittagong, 122, 169, 231
Bhutan, 44 Christians, 54, 224, 228, 250
Bhutto, Mumtaz Ali, 282 Chundrigar, I.I., 217
Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 141, 268, 279 Citizens’ Self Help Leagues, 201–202
Bi Amman, 183 citizenship, 2, 9–10, 16–18, 24, 66, 70, 80,
Bibi, Asia, 269 101–102, 136–137, 152, 156, 166,
‘Big Begums’, 208, 217, 222 168, 182, 206–207, 210, 212, 219,
Bihar, 126, 162 222–224, 239, 259, 263, 265, 284–288
Bijnor, 91 Civil and Military Gazette (Karachi), 60
Bint-i-Pakistan, 208–209 civil servants. See administrative officers
Black Coat Protests. See Lawyers’ Civil Services (Classification, Control and
Movement Appeal) Rules (India), 124
blackmarketeering, 62, 110, 121, 126–127, Civil Services (Prevention of Corruption
161, 201, 287 Rules, 1953 (Pakistan), 127
blasphemy, 268–269 civil supply, 115
Bogra, Begum Hamida, 214 Class IV Employees Association, 240
Bogra, Mohammad Ali, 58, 60, 143, 152, Collector. See administrative officers
175, 212–213, 215 communal representation, 186
310 Index

communal violence, 78, 168, 226, 231–235, decolonization, 11, 34, 69

257 decontrol, 109–110
Communist Party of India, 159, 161–162 Dehra Dun, 52, 74, 99, 117, 192–193
Communist Party of West Pakistan, 254 Delhi, 5, 7, 9, 23–24, 26–27, 29–30, 32, 35,
Congress Party, 6, 29, 32, 36–37, 42, 37, 39, 48, 54, 61–62, 65, 69–70,
49–50, 54, 62, 68, 91, 125, 143, 157, 72–73, 79, 82, 84, 86, 88–89, 91, 107,
159–162, 181, 188, 239, 246, 109, 115, 123, 131, 147, 192, 194,
262–263, 273 200, 225–226, 228, 230, 235, 244,
women, 190–191 262, 264, 303
Congress Seva Dal, 33 Chandni Chowk, 79
Congress Sewika Dal, 198 Delhi Mahila Samaj, 198
Congress system, 179 ‘Deliverance Day’, 52
Constituent Assembly Denotified Tribes Rights Action Group,
female membership, 211 267
India, 7, 28, 34, 51, 54–55, 104, 133, ‘denotified’ (ex-Criminal) tribes, 239
135, 139–140, 142, 145, 156, 198 Dentists’ Bills, 1953, 191
Pakistan, 43, 50, 58, 124, 132, 139–140, ‘Depressed Class’. See Dalits
148–150, 152–153, 176, 205–206, ‘Depressed Classes’. See Dalits
211, 216, 218–219, 227, 238, 247 Depressed Classes League, 241
Constitution, 280–281, 287–288 Deshpande, V.G., 93
Brazil, 17 Devi, Ganesh, 267
India, 3, 17, 34–35, 80, 83, 140–147, Devi, Mahasveta, 267
152, 156, 165, 191, 195, 223, 240, Dhaka, 60, 169, 231
243, 257, 262–265, 281, 286 Dharma Chakra, 54
Pakistan, 3, 17, 57, 141, 153–155, 177, Dharwar Mahamila Mandal, 200
216–218, 220, 223, 279 differentiated citizenship, 17–18
women, 17 Directive Principles of State Policy, 17, 276
constitution-making, 137–155 Director of Cottage Industries, 95
corruption, 9, 43, 47, 53, 68, 83–84, 91, 96, Director of Resettlement and Employment,
106, 114–118, 122–129, 143, 163– UP, 77
164, 179, 201, 245, 254, 260, 272–275 disability rights, 278
Muslim migrants from UP, 98–100 District Jatava Conference, 241
courts, 93, 107, 124 District Magistrate. See administrative
Cousins, Margaret, 183 officers
‘Criminal Tribes’, 21, 246–250 District Refugee Officers, 75
Criminal Tribes Act, 246 District Supply Officers, 113, 115, 163
Criminal Tribes Enquiry Committee Divorce of Judicial Separation 1956, 191
Report, 244 dowry deaths, 277
currency, 45–47, 130–131 Drugs and Cosmetics Bill, 1954, 191
Custodian of Evacuee Property, Sindh, 229 Dutta, B.N., 227
Custodian of Evacuee Property, UP, 83
East and West Punjab Evacuee Property
Dalits, 21, 224, 239, 243, 246, 257, 261, (Preservation) Ordinances, 1947, 225
266–267, 269–270 East Bengal, 25, 127, 224, 231–232, 234
Pakistan, 270–271 East Bengal Electoral Offences Ordinances,
Damodar Valley Scheme, 61 1954, 176
dams, 61 East Bengal Legislative Assembly, 60
Dantyagi, V.D., 83 East Pakistan, 8, 180, 224, 231, 246,
Das, Seth Govind, 90 282–283
Daultana, Mian Mumtaz, 172 Economic Rehabilitation Bill, 1948, 96
Dawn (Karachi), 40–41, 56, 91, 106, eid festivals, 58–59
119–120, 128, 132, 149–150, ‘Ek Kash Ki Kahani’ (A Story of A Puff ), 35
152–154, 204–205, 211, 230, 234, elections, 20, 138
249, 252 1945-6, 43
Declaration of the Rights of Man (France), 17 corruption, 160–161
 Index 311

East Bengal, 1954, 175–177 death of, 26–28, 150

electoral rolls, 156–157, 167–168 funeral, 28–32
India, 42, 60, 246 legacy, 42
India, 1951-52, 142, 156–165, 179 Ganga Prasad Memorial Hall, Lucknow,
India, 1957, 180, 191 234
Karachi Municipal Corporation, 1958, Ganges, 29
177–178 Gautam, Khan Chand, 162
Pakistan, 119, 165–167, 262, 279, 283 Ghosh, Molina, 194
Sindh Legislative Assembly, 173–174 Ghosh, Profulla Chandra, 32
voter registration, 166 Gidwani, Choitram P., 87–88
West Punjab Legislative Assembly, Goel, J.N., 84
172–173 Goonda Act, 210–211
women, 186 goondas, 210
Electoral Reform Commission Report, Gorakhpur, 48, 91
Pakistan, 173 Gordon-Walker, Patrick, 142
Equal Pay for Equal Work, 1956-57191 Government of India Act, 1935, 3, 7, 138,
Etawah, 164 151, 153, 156, 177, 186–188
ethnic tensions, 282–284 government servants. See administrative
evacuee property, 71, 80, 82–85, 88, officers
92–101, 105–106, 146, 192, 224–226, Government Servants’ Conduct Rules, UP,
230, 287 125
Karachi Agreement, 1949, 94 Grand Trunk Road, 71
recovery, 236–237 Gupta, C.B., 108
Evacuee Property Act, 236 Gwalior, 33
Evacuee Property Custodian, 95
Evacuee Property Ordinance, India, Habibullah, Begum, 233
82, 88, 94 Hafiz, Begum Abdul, 216
everyday state, 15–16, 107 Haig, Harry, 188
ex-‘Criminal Tribes’, 244 Halwais’ (Sweetmakers) Association, 163
Hameed, Dr Abdul, 233
Faiz, Faiz Ahmed, 256 Hamidullah, Zeb-un-Nissa, 67, 128–129,
Faridi, Begum Tazeem, 221 205–206, 210–211, 213
Fatehpur, 28 Haq, Fazlul, 176
Fazlullah, Kazi, 235 Haq, General Zia ul, 268, 276–279
Federation of University Women in India, Hardoi, 28
200 ‘Hardoi Incident’, 163
feminism, 184–185 Hardwar, 74
Firozabad, 79 harep, 256
First World War, 5 Hari Committee of Enquiry, 251–253
flooding, 167 haris, 224, 239, 250–256, 271
food and civil supply, 20, 47, 92, 106, 114, Hari-Zamindar Conference, 1949, 255
179, 258, 285 Haroon, Begum, 216
Food Grains Control Act, 132 Haroon, Yusuf, 52, 254
Foreign and Commonwealth Office, UK, Hazare, Anna, 273
146 Hegde, Anant Kumar, 259
freedom of speech, 144 Hindi language, 89
Friends Colony Association, Kanpur, 96 Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, 90
Fundamental Rights, 17, 135, 143, 145, Hindu Code Bill, 190, 197–199, 275
149, 198, 257 Hindu Mahasabha, 6, 28, 30, 33, 90–91,
93, 232
Gaikwad, Laxman, 267 Hindustan Times (Delhi), 61
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, 26–27, hoarding, 109–110
29, 32, 41, 54, 60, 89, 108–109, 115, hostage theory, 74
159, 183, 185 housing, 86, 96, 105, 111–114, 119, 200
death anniversaries, 41–42 Hudood Ordinances, 1979, 277
312 Index

Hurs, 247–250, 256 Jiye Sindh Mahaz (Long Live Sindh

Hussain, Begum Akhtar, 216 Movement), 283
Hussain, Begum Salma Tasadduq Hussain, Jodhpur, 235
206 Josh-i-Jehad (The Passion of Religious
Hussain, Chaudhary Haider, 233 Crusade), 89
Hyderabad (Deccan), 23, 31, 57, 161–162, judicial officers, 48
233 Jullundhri, Hafeez, 56
Hyderabad (Sindh), 52, 85, 133, 211,
225–229, 250, 255, 283 Kadir, Abdul, 256
Kanpur, 27, 47, 89, 91, 96, 113, 115, 122,
Iftikharuddin, Mian, 149 128–129, 235, 242, 266
Ikramullah, Begum Shaista, 206 Kanpur Development Board, 115
Independence Days, 23, 43, 64, 162 Kant, Radha, 77
India, 34, 52, 55, 60–62, 147 Karachi, 5, 7, 9, 24, 26, 33, 36, 38–39, 41,
Pakistan, 57–58, 60, 147, 209–210 43, 49–50, 53–54, 57–59, 64–65, 67,
Indian Administrative Service (IAS), 196 69–71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81, 85–86, 91,
Indian Citizenship Act, 1955, 16 96, 103–104, 110, 114, 117–121,
Indian Civil Service, 167 128, 131, 140, 147, 149, 151, 155,
Indian High Commission, Karachi, 230 168–169, 172, 174–176, 180,
Indian National Congress, 3 208–209, 211–216, 218, 221,
Indian Nursing Council Act, 1947, 191 225–230, 234–235, 254–255, 276,
Indian Provincial Service, 196 283, 299, 303
‘intending evacuee’, 81, 93 Bishop of, 39
Inter-Dominion agreements, 106, 130 separation from Sindh, 117–118
Inter-Dominion Conference, 1948, 74 Karachi Agreement, 1949, 225
International Convention on Civil and Karachi Congress Committee, 81–82
Political Rights, 269 Karachi Khawateen Muslim League, 214
Islamic Association of Women, 209 Karachi Municipal Advisory Committee,
Islamization, 276–278 64
Isphani, M.A.H., 152 Karachi Municipal Corporation, 64, 118,
171, 177–178, 209
Jacobabad, 174, 235 Karachi Muslim League, 207
Jafari, Begum Najma, 216 Kashmir, 8, 44, 49, 51
Jaipur, 33 Kasturba Nagar Co-Operative
Jamiat-i-Muhajireen Pakistan, 86 Multipurpose Society, 245
Jamiat-ul-Ulama, 88 Kathiawar, 227
Jan Lok Pal (Ombudsman) Bill, 273 Kaur, Raj Kumari Amrit, 183, 185
‘Jana Gana Mana’. See national anthem Kerjriwal, Arvind, 273
Jana Sangh, 159 Keswami Holaram H., 97, 229
Jang (Karachi), 120–121 khaddar, 221, 227
Jatoi, Hyder Bakhsh, 250, 255 khadi, 109
Jaunpur, 100 Khairpur State, 249
Jhansi, 89, 234 Khaksars, 33
Jinarajadass, Dorothy Graham, 183 Khaliquzzaman, Chaudhry, 40, 54, 235,
Jinnah Awami Muslim League, 172 253
Jinnah, Fatima, 38, 42, 79, 176, 203 Khan, Abdul Waheed, 208
Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 3, 26, 43, 46, Khan, Begum Muhammad Hussain, 207
49, 51–53, 55, 57, 59, 122, 148, 150, Khan, Brigadier R.F., 221
189–190, 216, 280 Khan, Dildar, 234
death and funeral, 36 Khan, General Muhammad Ayub, 141,
death anniversaries, 42 152, 213, 279
tomb, 59 Khan, General Muhammad Yahya, 279
use of name, 40–41 Khan, Imran, 275
‘Jinnahspirin’, 40 Khan, K.R. Jamshed Ali, 234
 Index 313

Khan, Liaquat Ali, 57–59, 69, 86, 121, Lucknow, 27, 33, 47–48, 76, 86, 90, 94,
147–148, 150–151, 173, 207, 215, 100, 110, 116, 164, 194, 232–234,
229, 235, 303 238, 241, 246, 266
funeral, 41 Lucknow Municipal Board, 107
Khan, Maulana Mohammad Akram, 149 Lucknow Women’s Association, 194
Khan, Maulvi Tamizuddin, 153
Khan, N.M., 177 Madras, 123, 161–162, 185, 195, 199
Khan, Raana Liaquat Ali, 79, 202–203, Madras Legislative Council, 185
215, 276 Maharashtra, 195
Khan, Zafrullah, 37 Mahila Mandals, 278
Khanna, A.D., 228 Mahila Matadhikar Samiti, 165
Khanum, Azra, 190 Mahila Sanghams, 272
Khawateen Muslim League, 207 majoritarianism, 287–288
Khawateen-i-Anjuman-i-Tablighul Islam, Malabar, 200
214 Malaviya, K.K., 164
Khawateen-i-Pakistan, 214 Malaviya, Madan Mohan, 6
Khawja Bakhtyar, 32 Mandal Commission, 1979, 265–266
Khilafat movement, 183 maps, 44
Khuhro, Muhammad Ayub, 78–79, 87, 97, marriage law reform, 212–213
125, 174, 227–229, 255 Masih, Rimsha, 269
Khulna District, 231 Masud, Muhammad, 252–254
Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party, 164 Mayo, Katherine, 184
Kishanchand, P.R., 89 Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, 272–273
Kishore, Acharya Jugal, 52 Meerut, 28, 84, 100
Kohli, Krishna Kumari, 270 Mehta, Urmila, 195
Kohli, Veerji, 270 Menon, Lakshmi N., 194
Kripalani, Acharya, 146 Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation, India,
Kripalani, Sucheta, 93 99
Krishnamachari, T.T., 103, 133 minorities, 19, 73–74, 80, 224–239,
Kukhayal, Hundraj, 229 268–271, 281, 287–288
Kuril, Tilak Chand, 241 loyalty, 90–92, 98–100, 130, 132, 235
nationality, 135–136
Lahiri, Ashutosh, 91 property rights, 235–237
Lahore, 62, 69, 169, 172, 183, 208, 210, Mirpurkhas, 283
216, 218, 277 Mirza, General Iskander, 152, 155
Lahore College for Women, 190 Mitter, S.C., 116
Lahore Ladies Federation for Women’s Modi, Narendra, 262, 281
Rights, 218 mohalla, 15, 33
Lahore Resolution, 1940, 57, 74 Mohammad, Din, 255
Lahori, Majeed, 121 Mohammad, Ghulam, 122, 152
Lajpatnagar Panchayat Settlement, 89 Mohani, Maulana Hasrat, 234
Lal, Ramesh, 269 monsoon rains, 118
Lalukhet, 120 Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, 1919, 185
land reform, 271–272 Moon, Penderel, 160
Larkana, 85, 97, 225, 229, 283 Moradabad, 117, 232
Lawyers’ Movement, 274 Mother India, 184
League for the Rights of Women, 215–216 Mountbatten, Lady Edwina, 1
legal activism, 260, 274 Mountbatten, Louis 1st Earl Mountbatten,
Legal Framework Order, 1970, 279–280 32
Liaquatabad, 120 Movement for the Restoration of Judiciary.
licences. See permits See Lawyers’ Movement
Lok Janshakti Party, 266 muhajir, 7, 25, 73, 256, 283
Lok Sabha, 7, 62, 157, 276 Muharram, 60
Long March, 2009, 274 Mujtaba, Qazi, 254
314 Index

Mukerjee, Amarendra Nath, 135–136 Niazi, Maulana Abdus Sattar Khan, 208
mullahism, 149 Nimbkar, R.S., 197
Munshi, K.M., 127 Noakhali, 231
Musharraf, General Pervez, 269, 274, 279 nurses, 202
Muslim Dissolution of Marriage Act, 1939, NWFP, 51
190
Muslim Family Law Ordinances, 1961, 213 Objectives Resolution, 1949, 148–152, 205
Muslim Ladies’ Conference, 183 One Unit, 8, 154, 218, 247
Muslim League, 6, 50, 53, 60, 68, 76, 87, ‘Operation Cleanup’, 155
118–119, 154, 168, 172–176, 181, Ora, 109
211, 216–217, 233, 235, 237, 253, 257 Orissa, 161, 200
Two-Nation theory, 90
women, 189–190, 216 Pakistan Citizenship Acts (1951, 1952), 16,
Muslim League National Census Guards, 219, 223
168 Pakistan Dalit Forum, 269
Muslim League National Guard, 45 Pakistan Dalit Solidarity Network, 269
Muslim League Parliamentary Board, UP, Pakistan Day, 57
87 Pakistan Employees Cooperative Housing
Muslim League’s Women’s Committee, Society, 119
217 Pakistan Federation of Women’s Rights,
Muslim National Guard, 33, 228 219–220
Muslim Personal Law, 275 Pakistan Fisher Folk Forum, 272
Muslim Women’s (Right to Protection on Pakistan Hindu Welfare Association, 269
Divorce) Bill, 1986, 276 Pakistan Housing Colony, Karachi, 86–87
Mussoorie, 117 Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and
Mutiny-Uprising, 1857, 62–63 Research, 271
Muttahida Qaumi Movement, 283 Pakistan Ministry for Refugees and
Rehabilitation, 75
Naidu, Sarojini, 47 Pakistan Muslim League - Nawaz, 283
Narayan, Jayaprakash, 32, 159 Pakistan National Anthem Committee, 56
Narejo, Muhammad Ali, 249 Pakistan National Assembly, 279
National Alliance of People’s Movements, Pakistan National Guard, 49
273 Pakistan People’s Party, 268, 275, 280, 282
national anthem, 55–56 Pakistan Refugee Rehabilitation Finance
National Council of Women, 184, 198 Corporation, 78
national emblem, 53 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 151, 217, 253
national flag, 44, 54–55, 61, 148 Pakistan Women’s Volunteer Service,
National Herald (Lucknow), 48, 113 203–204
National Museum, India, 143 Pakistan Women’s National Guard,
nationality, 135–136 204–205
Nawabshah, 249–250, 252, 283 Pakistan Women’s Naval Reserve, 204–205
Nayar, Sushila, 2 Pakistan-Sind Joint Refuge Council, 75
Nazimuddin, Khwaja, 38–39, 150, 210 Pal, Prakashvati Yash, 194
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 1–3, 23, 30, 34–35, 42, Paliwal, S.K.D., 109, 163–164
61–62, 69, 79, 87–88, 143–146, 150, Pandey, Sandeep, 273
157, 159–160, 165, 195, 198, 235 Pant, G.B., 47, 90–91, 122, 143–145, 160,
Nehru, Rameshwari, 1, 165, 244–245 188–189
Nehru-Liaquat Agreement, 1950, 235–236 Panther, Dhaniram, 266
Neogy, K.C., 103 Parsaram, 91
newspapers, 14, 19, 32, 80–82, 106–107, Parsis, 225
116, 119–121, 146 Partition, 1–3, 8, 12, 15, 24, 43, 49, 71–73,
India, 29–30, 43, 51, 61, 128, 161, 165 107, 161–162, 166, 180, 205, 225, 282
letters to the editor, 107 Pashtun, 51
Pakistan, 8, 57, 131, 178, 227, 230 Pasi Mahasabha, 241
 Index 315

Pasi Sammelan, 242 Pune Pact, 1932, 185

passports, 16, 100 Punjab, 1, 7–8, 24, 31, 49, 73, 77, 127, 161,
Patel, Baburao, 89 167, 202, 224, 271, 285
Patel, Vallabhai, 28, 32, 34, 61–62, 86, 90, Punjab Municipal Act, 1952, 191
234, 262 purdah, 192, 205, 276
Pathan, 51 ‘Purdah Bill’, 208
Patna, 110
PEPSU, 161 Qadri, Mumtaz, 274
Percival Griffiths, Sir, 21 Qanun-i-Shahadat (Law of Evidence)
permit system, 227, 230 Order, 1983, 277
permits, 82, 98, 115, 179 qawwali, 40
petitions, 107, 243 Quaid-i-Millat. See Khan, Liaquat Ali
Pilibhit, 232 Quaid-i-Azam. See Jinnah, Muhammad Ali
Pir Pagaro, 247–250, 256 Quaid-i-Azam Relief Fund, 40, 78
Pir Shah Mardan Shah II. See Pir Pagaro Queen Victoria, 63
Pir Sibghatullah Shah II. See Pir Pagaro Qureshi, Dr. I.H., 151
place, significance of, 3–5 Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki. See Bakhtyar,
police, 12, 32, 47, 50, 68, 79, 91, 109, 116, Khwaja
122, 128, 131–132
women, 192–193, 196 Radio Pakistan, 51, 55–57, 170, 215
polygamy, 212–215 Rae Bareli, 163
postage stamps, 44 Rahman, Fazlur, 123
Postal and Telegraph Department, India, railways, 32, 71, 74, 98, 109, 134
197 Raj Ghat, 30
Praja Party, 162 Rajasthan, 88, 161
Prakasa, Sri, 101, 226–228 Ram, Chet, 246
Prasad, Rajendra, 199 Ram, Shri Sewak, 245
Press (Incitement to Violence) Bill, 1931, Rao, Kitty Shiva, 198
144 rape, 277–278
Press (Incitement to Violence) Bill, 1951, Rashid Commission, 220
144 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS),
Prevention of Anti-Women Practices Act, 27–28, 33, 89, 281
2011, 279 Rasool, Begum Qudsia Aizaz, 163, 233
Prevention of Food Adulteration Bills, Rathbone, Eleanor, 185
1952-60191 rationing, 68, 70, 108–111, 114
princely states, 49 Rawalpindi, 41, 210
PRODA. See Public and Representative Rawalpindi Conspiracy, 1951, 173
Offices (Disqualification) Act, 1949 Raza, Begum Soghra, 211
Professional and Business Women’s Club, Raza, Syed Hashim, 39, 64, 169, 173
216 Reddi, Muthlakshmi, 185
Professional Women’s Club, 218 Refugee Department, UP, 84
Prohibition of Dowry Bills, 1951-58191 Refugee Rehabilitation Finance
Protection, Maintenance, Custody, Corporation, Pakistan, 58
Education and Employment of refugees, 7–8, 15, 27, 31, 34, 58–59, 72–79,
Children, 1953, 191 84, 100, 103–104, 146, 192, 225–226,
provincialism, 148 235
Public and Representative Offices organizations, 87–89, 94
(Disqualification) Act, 1949, 124–125, repatriation, 236–237
152, 174 Rehabilitation Department, Pakistan, 85
public servants. See administrative officers Rehabilitation Finance Administration, 77
public services. See administrative officers Rehabilitation Ordinance, Pakistan, 82
Public Services Commission, 188–189 rent control, 82, 113
public sphere, 14 republic, 146–147
Public Works Department, 113 Republic Day, 34–35, 143
316 Index

Republican Party, 266 Shahnawaz, Begum Jahan Ara, 206, 218,

reservations, 265, 270, 279–280 220
in government services, 240–242 Shaikh, Begum, 220
Reserve Bank of India, 45–46 Shaikh, General K.M., 221
Right to Information Act, 2005, 272 Shariat Application Act, 1937, 190
rights movements, 107, 195, 213–216, 222, Shastri, Algu Rai, 244
239, 242–243, 257, 261, 263, 266, Shastri, Amar Nath, 35
272, 285 Shastri, Raja Ram, 163
Roosevelt, Eleanor, 167 Shastri, Ramanand, 241
Roshni, 194–199, 201 Shenai, Vilasini Devi, 190–191
Round Table Conferences, 6 Shikarpur, 225, 227
Roy, M.N., 139, 165 Shirkatgarh, 276
Royal Indian Air Force, 61 Shukla, Bhagwati Prasad, 246
Royal Indian Navy, 61 Sind Cotton Growers and Abadgars
Association, 133
Saadulah, Muhammad, 54 Sind Hari Committee, 250
Sabar, Budhan, 267 Sind Hari Federation, 256
Saddy, Aliya, 213 Sind Hindu League, 229
Sadeque, Najma, 277 Sind Maintenance of Public Safety
Sahai, Govind, 76, 94 Ordinance, 1947, 77
Saharanpur, 74, 81, 232, 234 Sind Settlement Committee, 249
Saheli (‘Beloved Friend’), 277 Sind Tenancy Act, 1950, 255–256, 271
Sambhali, S.M. Ishaq, 232 Sind Tenancy Bill, 1949, 255
Sanghar, 250 Sindh, political context, 5–7, 26, 105, 249,
Sanwal, B.D., 52, 117 256, 296
Sanyukt Kori Mahasangh, 243 Sindh Awami Mahaz, 247
Sarabhai, Mridula, 1 Sindh Land Reform Movement, 271
Sarvodaya Daya, 35 Sindh Legislative Assembly, 97–98, 117,
sati, 182 173, 254–255
Sattar, Farooq, 283 Sindh Provincial Congress Committee, 228
Savarkar, V.D., 33, 90 Sindh Provincial Muslim League, 52, 253
Saxena, Mohanlal, 230 Sindh provincial services, 167
Sayed, G.M., 7, 247, 283 Sindh Sujag Jathas (‘Sindh Awakening
Scheduled Castes Federation (SCF), 159, Squads’), 283
246 Sindhi Hindu Refugee Panchayat, 88
Scheduled Castes (SC), 240–243, 247, 265 Sindhi language, 282–284
Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SC/STs), Sindhi Panchayat, 84
240 Singh, Bhagwat, 244
Scheduled Castes Federation of Pakistan, Singh, C.P.N., 142
269 Singh, Chaudhury Charan, 164
Scheduled Castes Welfare Association, 241 Singh, Gurbhachan, 2
Scheduled Tribes (ST), 265 Singh, Phool, 232
Second World War, 3, 5, 43, 68, 108, 189 Singh, Sukumar, 157
secularism, 18, 29–30, 34, 257, 282, 288 Singha, S.P., 224
Sehgal, Mrs Manmoham, 165 Sipri Bazar Jama Masjid, 234
separate electorates, 269 Slade, E.H., 169
Servants of the People Society, 244 smuggling, 129–133, 254
Seth, Bishan Chandra, 232 Socialist Party, 159, 162
Seth, Damodar Swarup, 91 Sood, Prakashvati, 84
Seva Dal, 52 space, 12–16
Shahabuddin, Khwaja, 79, 170–171, 235 Special Police Establishment, 123–124
Shahdara and Sansi Colony for ex-Criminal Star (Karachi), 277
Tribes, 244 state, 10–15
Shahjahanpur, 91, 116 ceremonies, 19, 25–42
Shahjahanpur District, 237 State Bank of Pakistan, 49
 Index 317

States Muslim League, 52 ‘Untouchables’. See Dalits

statues, politics of, 62–63 UP (Uttar Pradesh), political context, 4–6
streets, renaming of, 64 UP Adi Hindu Depressed Classes
Subaltern Studies, 140 Association, 241
Sukarno, President of Indonesia, 56 UP Administration of Evacuee Property
Sukkur, 79, 132, 174, 212, 225, 227, 283 Ordinance, 1949, 92–93
Suppression of Immoral Traffic in Women UP Evacuees Administration of Property
and Brothels Act, 1953, 191, 193 Act, 1948, 81, 92
Supreme Court Bar Association, 274 UP Food Grain Movement Order, 115
Swaraj Bhavan Children’s National UP Land Acquisition (Rehabilitation and
Institute, 201 Refugees) Act, 1948, 84
Swatantra Mills, 244 UP Legislative Assembly, 90, 113
Sylhet, 231 UP Maintenance of Public Order
(Temporary) Act, 1948, 51
Tando Allahyar, 52 UP Maintenance of Public Order Bill,
Tandon, P.D., 30, 42, 87–90, 94, 145–146, 1948, 28
244–245 UP Momin Conference, 164
Taseer, Salman, 268, 274 UP Provincial Congress Committee, 232
Teaching, Promotion and Use of Sindhi UP State Assembly, 162, 164, 246
Language Bill, 1972, 282 UP State Congress Committee, 164
Tehreek-i-Insaaf, 275 UP State Legislative Assembly, 52, 89
Tehri District, 52 UP Weaver’s Cooperative Association, 243
Telangana, 272 urban protest, 107, 109–110, 118–119
Tharparkar, 249, 270 Urdu, 51, 64, 89, 235, 280, 282–283
Tharparkar District, 225, 253 Usmani, Maulana Shabbir Ahmad, 86, 125
Thatta, 52 Uttar Pradesh Sanyukt Kori Mahasangh, 242
The Hindu (Delhi), 34
The Modern Review (Calcutta), 135–136 ‘Vande Mataram’, 55
The Nineteenth Century (London), 21 Varma, Raghunath Prasad, 95
‘Thru a Woman’s Eyes’. See Hamidullah, Vazirani, Goverdhan, 228
Zeb-un-Nissa Vidhan Sabha, 243
tin talak, 275 Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Mahasangh, 266
Town Rationing Officers, 74, 89, 115 Vimukt Jati Sevak Sangh, 244–245
trade unions, 110, 120, 133, 163, 240, 254, vimukta jatis, 21
271 Vishindas, Sirumal, 97–98
Trained Nurses Association of Pakistan, ‘volunteer’ organizations, 28
202
transgender, 279 water shortages, 67
Transnational Advocacy Networks, 261 West Bengal Provincial Congress
Travancore-Cochin, 159, 161–162 Committee, 233
tribal communities, 224 West Pakistan Assembly, 247
‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech, 23–24 West Punjab Legislative Assembly, 208
Tulsidas, 201 widow remarriage, 182
Tyagi, Mahavir, 52, 76 Widow Remarriage Committee, 204
women, 21, 34, 49, 156–157, 165, 171,
Umerkot, 256, 271 181–222, 260, 275–280, 286
Uniform Civil Code (UCC), 275 and anti-corruption, 128–129
United Front, 60, 119, 175 citizenship, 10, 181–222
United Front of Women for Freedom and colonial developments, 182–191
Protection of People’s Rights, 217 communal violence, 233
United Nations Declaration of Human elections, 209
Rights, 261 government service, 186–189, 196–197
universal rights, 17–18 in the police, 193
universal suffrage, 156–157, 181, 223, 254, post-1947 India, 191–202
264 post-1947 Pakistan, 202–222
318 Index

women (cont.) Women’s Indian Association, 183, 185

representation, 216–217 Women’s Rights Committee, 216–217
reservation of seats, 206–207, 219, 279 Women’s Volunteer Group, 220–221
responsible citizenship, 212
rights, 214–216, 278 Yamuna, 30
Women’s Action Forum, 276
Women’s Medical School, 187 zamindar, 132, 251–252, 254, 256
Women’s Protection Bill, 2006, 278 zamindari abolition, 48, 145, 251, 253
Women’s Refugee Rehabilitation Zardari, Asif Ali, 275, 280
Committee, 216 Zina Ordinance, 1979, 276, 278