The July 15, 2013 House of Lords ceremony

Dr Ishtiaq Ahmed

Baroness Flather recalled her joyful days in Lahore as a teenager. Her closest friends were Muslims. She would go to the Imambargah and her Muslim friends were always taking part in Hindu festivals 

On July 15, 2013, Baroness Shreela Flather, great granddaughter of the great builder, social reformer and philanthropist of undivided Punjab, Sir Ganga Ram, hosted my book The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed (Oxford, 2012), in Committee Room No. 2 of the House of Lords. It was packed to full capacity and many people had to stand for the two hours we spent discussing it.

Once the hereditary preserve of the British aristocracy (now includes non-hereditary peers), the House of Lords historically played the decisive role as a counterweight to absolute monarchy and thus set into motion the democratisation process that over several centuries culminated in power transferring decisively to the directly-elected House of Commons. The two houses of Parliament stand majestically in the centre of London at Westminster.

Baroness Flather welcomed the guests, who included members of the two houses of the British Parliament, a cross section of Indians and Pakistanis, and even a Sri Lankan gentleman, Joe Nathan, Editor of Confluence. Some relatives of British officers who served in the Punjab in 1947 also attended the book launch.

Baroness Flather recalled her joyful days in Lahore as a teenager. She lived with her family next to the Sherpao Bridge. Her closest friends were Muslims, especially a Shia family bearing the surname Hakim. She would go to the Imambargah and her Muslim friends were always taking part in Hindu festivals. Then in May 1947 that halcyon world came crashing down as criminals aided and abetted by biased police (73 percent of the Punjab police was Muslim) began to hound the Hindus and Sikhs out of Lahore. However, in England she continued to meet Pakistanis and visited Lahore a number of times. Her best friend in Lahore was the late Afsar Qizilbash. She surprised everyone by saying that she always received more love and affection in Pakistan, especially Lahore, than in India.

Eminent Punjabi poet and leading scholar of Punjabi sufism, Sarwat Mohiuddin, travelled all the way from Lahore to share her authoritative views on my book in the light of sufism. She observed that even in the greatly disturbed atmosphere of 1947, the humanistic teachings of sufis, sants and gurus stood in good stead and helped save lives. Her speech was very well received.

The next speaker was Dr Arunabha Roy. I had met him in Nagpur on February 7, 2013 at Ajay Deshpande’s residence. Dr Roy, a Bengali brought up in Mumbai, won the hearts of everyone in the room with his brilliantly incisive and insightful observations about the findings of the book. He said that previously he believed that Indians and Pakistanis had nothing in common, but not anymore. The book made him realise that there were good and bad people in all communities, and therefore responsible intellectuals had a duty to preach and promote peace and friendship.

Dr Pritam Singh of Oxford Brookes University was the third speaker. He brought to bear his vast knowledge of ethnic conflict in his remarks. He made the very important point that without the state conniving at or participating in ethnic cleansing and genocide, such crimes against humanity are not possible. The comparisons he drew with later events such as the 1984 slaughter of Sikhs in Delhi and other parts of India were ample corroboration of the central argument of my book.

Professor Amin Mughal provided a sketch about me as a young student in Lahore who was involved in left politics. I then narrated how the Punjab book was conceived and the why and how it was completed against all odds.

The question and answer session had very useful interventions from Musthaq Lashari and some other guests. Peter Riddell of the Initiatives of Change wanted to know the role of the British in the partition of the Punjab. I told him that the British administration in the Punjab kept warning the viceroy in Delhi that a bloodbath would take place in Punjab, and he needed thousands of British troops to supervise a peaceful transfer of power, but Delhi did not pay heed to his warnings. On August 4, 1947, Governor Sir Evan Jenkins noted that only 5,200 people had been killed in Punjab since January 1947 (I think the actual figure was around 7,000 at least). However, once power was transferred to the Indian and Pakistan administrations in the two Punjabs, the loss of life shot up to a staggering 500,000 to 800,000. Out of Punjab’s 34 million total population, some 10 million or 30 percent was forced to flee for their lives to the other side of the border drawn on August 17, 1947 by the Radcliffe Award.

I pointed out that accusations of individual British officials siding with one community or the other did exist and were included in my book. The decision taken by Lord Mountbatten to transfer power in mid-August 1947 instead of June 1948 greatly aggravated the explosive situation in Punjab. Therefore, it was at the level of the viceroy and above that the British could be held responsible for the great tragedy of the Punjab.

Christopher Graham narrated that his father was sent by the BBC to report the “peaceful transfer of power in 1947”. When he instead reported that it was anything but peaceful, London did not like it.

In her concluding remarks Baroness Flather said that she had attended many book launches, but nothing compared to the interest and tempo that the Punjab book had generated.

Some of us then went to the Punjab Restaurant (established in 1946) in Covent Gardens, London, for a hearty dinner and talked till late in the night.

The writer is a PhD (Stockholm University); Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University; and Honorary Senior Fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Latest publications: Pakistan: The Garrison State, Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947-2011), Karachi: Oxford Unversity Press, 2013; The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed: Unravelling the 1947 Tragedy through Secret British Reports and First-Person Accounts (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2012; New Delhi: Rupa Books, 2011). He can be reached at billumian@gmail.com

From Daily Times, Sunday, July 15, 2013