Side-effect Muhajirs----Part - I

Sindh and its capital city Karachi is set on fire again. While old wounds are left merely to time to heal by the Pakistani state, new wounds are inflicted by the state and non-state actors on the people of Sindh from time to time. The reinvention of the demand for a Muhajir province to be geographically carved out from the province of Sindh in the last few weeks is a disturbing development. It remains the only example of its kind in Pakistan and perhaps the whole of the Subcontinent where the third generation of immigrants would want a province of their own.
Hindus and Sikhs migrated from what is now Pakistan to what is now India. They were called Sharnarthi in the initial years. But that remained a ‘status’ and did not turn into a demand for a separate ‘ethnic’ identity. It is unique that a racially, and somewhat linguistically, diverse population comes together by circumstance and claims a right to ethnic identity or a nationality in Pakistani political and social discourse. It is important to revisit and track the emergence of Muhajir identity in Pakistan. My word limit for this column will make me write more than one piece in this series, this being the first one.
About seventy percent of the refugees who came to West Pakistan were Punjabis from Indian Punjab and settled mostly in Pakistani Punjab which had observed a large exodus of about six million Hindus and Sikhs. Altogether, Punjab absorbed eighty percent of the refugee population including non-Punjabi immigrants who had mostly come from Delhi, UP and Rajasthan. The assimilation in Punjab was relatively easier, although it had its own stresses, because most of the immigrants shared the language and culture. Even those who were in small numbers from Delhi, UP and Rajasthan were not as distinct from the local population as they were in other parts of the country.
While only a very small percentage of immigrants settled in the then NWFP and Balochistan, more than one million arrived in Sindh. They came from Delhi, UP, Rajasthan, Indian Punjab (which now includes Punjab, Haryana and Himachal), CP (now Madhya Pradesh), Bihar, Hyderabad Deccan (now Andhra Pradesh), Gujarat and Kathiawar, Kutch and Maharashtra. A small number joined them from Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kashmir. I remember clearly from the late 1970s and the early 1980s that the people in Karachi used the word Hindustani for those who came from northern and central India as a distinct category from Bihari, Memon, Gujarati, Kathiawari and Hyderabadi.
Karachi became the capital of Pakistan and, on Quaid-e-Azam’s insistence, was severed from Sindh. Muhajirs filled up many new federal government jobs and their elite rose to a position of power. Sindh had a very small Muslim middle-class at the time of Partition. Muhajirs filled the vacuum created by the exit of Hindus and constituted a majority in Karachi and were dominant in some other cities of Sindh. The Muhajir elite shared absolute power with the Punjabis in the government bureaucracy of Pakistan. The Muhajir middle-class was absorbed in the newly emerging media and professional services. A sizeable number of upper and middle-class Muhajirs filed claims, bogus or real, to possess properties left by Hindus in lieu of what they had left in India. A large number of Muhajirs lived in harsh conditions but they had a much larger affluent middle-class than the local population. With Punjabis, Muhajirs were the main proponents of Pakistani nationalism on the basis of the two-nation theory and supported a strong centre denying the existence of a heterogeneous state around them.
(To be continued)
The writer is an Islamabad-based poet and author. Email: harris.khalique@gmail.com