HARKING BACK: First proletarian revolution and self-rule after 744 years

Alot has been said about how Lahore, and Punjab, were shaped by powerful invaders over time passing through the western mountain passes. In 1765 for the first time the Punjabis ruled themselves for 84 years. Then from the east came the British in 1849 and ended that rare freedom.

In almost every book of history we are told of the rich and powerful rulers and their armies. What we never dwell on is how the poor of our land and city were the real propellants of change. Sadly, in the end it were the rich who enriched themselves on the gains of the poor. Even today each political promise, deliberately vague, ends up enriching the corrupt and powerful. Every vote seems to end up compromised. But then history tells us that real change has only come about when the poor man rose to forcibly bring it about.

When the three Sikh rulers of Lahore, namely Gujjar Singh, Lehna Singh and Sobha Singh, took over Lahore on the 16th of April, 1765, it was surely a powerful Punjabi peasant military force that was stepping into the shoes of the Afghan looter Ahmed Shah Abdali and his governor Kabuli Mal. Unable to get a weak Mughal emperor to save his skin and with the Afghans busy with their infighting in Kabul, Kabuli Mal went to Jammu to recruit mercenary Dogra soldiers to crush the rising peasants of the Punjab.

When Kabuli Mal returned he was mauled by the peasant forces. The rise of the Punjabi peasantry, led by Sikh Misls, and the crushing of Mughal and Afghan marauders is the only way to study the rise of the Sikhs, all of whom were Punjabi Jat farmers facing virtual starvation by numerous high taxes by multiple exploiters.

This was not the only time the oppressed farmer had risen. If we go back to the days of the Mughal emperor Akbar, otherwise known as ‘Great’, he came and stayed in Lahore primarily because the peasants of the Punjab were up in arms against high rural taxation. Such was the level of exploitation that the greatest ever famine broke out in Lahore. Hundreds of dead bodies, picked up from the streets of Lahore, were thrown away every morning in the fields of today’s Mahmood Booti area. That famine etched its place in popular memory as “Moyaan de Mandi”.

During this time exceptional and forced extraction by Mughal forces, followed by still more extraction by the local landowner, was leaving the poor with virtually no wheat or grains to eat. This saw the rise of Abdullah Bhatti, known popularly as ‘Dulla Bhatti’, who led a small army of poor peasants to rise up in arms to challenge the Mughal forces encamped in Lahore. Akbar responded with rare ruthlessness.

In the end Dulla Bhatti was lured to Lahore in 1599 and was skinned alive after being hung from the main gate of the Lahore Fort. Mind you his father and grandfather were also hanged for the same cause. Dulla Bhatti, though he lives in popular imagination, rests virtually unknown in the Miani Sahib Graveyard of Lahore. What does this reflect about our current mindset? Nothing seems to have changed.

But the rise of the Punjab peasantry really took a far greater lethal shape when the inept Mughals were not able to stop constant Afghan invasions. The new invaders started off ruthlessly by pillage, loot and widespread rape. Waris Shah was to write: “What is in your mouth is yours, the rest Ahmad Shah will steal”. This was when the peasantry at every level, crushed under crippling taxation, joined hands. Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs all collectively helped one another fight off tax collectors. The real opening came with the rise of Banda Singh Bahadar, a mystic of sorts, who was ultimately beheaded and skinned in Mughal-ruled Delhi.

The fast dwindling power of the inept Mughals as their empire disintegrated meant that they were not able to provide military assistance to stop Afghan invaders. Internally, Punjabi peasants of every social and religious variety were taxed to unbearable levels by local Hindu agents, and also by largely Muslim landlords of Afghani, Irani and Turani origin, acting for themselves as well as for Mughals and then also the Afghan ruler. In some places utter starvation was the result.

Just how did this vacuum come about? A lot of us have never studied this immensely important period in the history of Lahore and Punjab. Even today it remains shunned, even though it represents a glorious period of our land and city. Afghan invaders kept returning to the sub-continent to pillage. In a way that process is as old as time, and, to be honest, still continues. Today we shut our eyes to the Afghan majority within the Walled City of Lahore. Only now the process is subtle with religious piety cloaking the process. Their backers are well known.

The power vacuum opened up in 1752 when the weak Mughal court could no longer provide the Governor of Lahore with military assistance as Afghan raids increased. For them the increasing power of Punjab’s peasantry, led as they were by the Sikhs, was becoming unsustainable. For this reason the Governor set off to search for foreign mercenaries, like the Dogras of Jammu.

The fast growing power of Sikhs is in reality the story of the poor exploited peasantry of Punjab. Legally speaking Lahore was under Mughal rule, at least until the 13th of April, 1752, when the Mughal emperor, ironically also named Ahmed Shah, under the influence of his handsome Irani eunuch ‘darogha’ Javed Khan, had in a treaty signed away sovereign power over Lahore from the Mughal Empire to the ruler of Kabul.

This important event to a considerable extent shaped the future of Lahore and the Punjab. More than half a century later Maharaja Ranjit Singh got legal sovereignty restored with the Treaty of Amritsar of 1809. Many think that this agreement had prevented the British from taking over Punjab directly. Some historians believe that British incursions into Afghanistan – via Sindh - was the real reason they wanted to, ultimately, legally annex the Punjab.

The fact is that Afghan and Mughal strength was being effectively drained by the Punjabis themselves and not the British. The rising power of Punjab’s peasantry is what kept the British at bay. Sadly, this part of our history we never research, let alone acknowledge. After Mir Mannu, with local peasant assistance, defeated Ahmed Shah Abdali on the 11th of March, 1748, in Manudar, the defeated Afghan headed for Lahore. The ineffective Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah immediately appointed Mir Mannu as the Viceroy of Punjab.

As Mughal and Afghan forces clashed, Punjabi peasants quickly started to occupy huge tracts of land. Their first target was the exploiting landlords, who they started butchering. The peasants formed ‘panchayats’ and tried every landlord. Peasant courts punished them ruthlessly. Punjab as an ‘income generator’ had ceased to exist for both the Mughals and the Afghans. In a way it was Punjab’s first proletarian revolution.

The Mughals and Afghans immediately firmed up a ‘silent peace agreement’ so as to weaken the Punjabi peasantry. The gruesome massacres that followed are the bloodiest in our history. Outside Lahore’s Delhi Gate butchers spent a whole week slaughtering innocent Sikh men, women and children. The ‘Shaheedi Khoo’ inside Landa Bazaar is testimony to those events.

With the peasant forces weakened, Ahmed Shah Abdali invaded in December 1751 and defeated the Mughal forces. In a daring move Mir Mannu, the Mughal governor was made the Afghan ruler of the Punjab. This effectively ended Mughal rule and the Mughal emperor signed away Lahore and Multan to the Afghans.

The fight from here onwards was between the Afghans and the peasants of the Punjab. The rich rulers invariably sided with the stronger Afghans. With time and given their fluid guerrilla tactics, the Punjabis slowly, and without break, weakened the Afghans till such time they themselves felt threatened. In this context on the 16th of April, 1765, the Sikh trio of Lehna Singh, Gujjar Singh and Sobha Singh took over Lahore. Finally after 744 years of foreign rule, Punjab was free again.