Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [160]
The ethnic impact of the migration from India on Pakistani Punjab was far less than on Sindh, where the migrants came from completely different parts of the British Indian empire – in Punjab, refugees were settled among fellow Punjabis. The scale of the movement however was immense. Out of the more than 7.25 million people who moved from India to Pakistan, 5.28 million moved from east (Indian) to west (Pakistani) Punjab. After 1947, these refugees made up just over 25 per cent of the population of Pakistani Punjab, one of the highest proportions of refugees in an area in recorded history.
This forced migration built on already existing Punjabi traditions of peaceful economic migration to develop new land and new businesses, which already under the British had taken hundreds of thousands of Punjabis to settle in the new canal colonies of Sindh (which were created in the 1930s, two generations after those of Punjab) and to work as shopkeepers and artisans in Balochistan. From the 1950s on, these traditions took hundreds of thousands more to the terraced houses of Leeds, Leicester and Oxford.
The east Punjabi refugees of 1947 brought two things with them to their new homes in west Punjab (mostly homes and lands abandoned by fleeing Hindus and Sikhs). The first was relative economic and social dynamism created by the shock to their old settled ways. Because they moved to another part of the same province, and en masse as whole village communities, the element of disruption was less than in the case of the Mohajirs in Sindh.
Nonetheless, the experience of being uprooted, and the consequent undermining of the old landowning elites, meant that the Punjabi migrants also were to some extent shaken out of their old patterns. Those who were unable to find land in the countryside settled in the cities, entering new trades and professions. This strengthened the element of independence and egalitarianism already present in some of the northern Punjabi castes – especially the Jats, who like to say of themselves, ‘The Jats bow the knee only to themselves and God.’
The other thing that the refugees naturally contributed was a particularly intense hatred and fear of India, which remains far stronger in Punjab than in Sindh or the NWFP – just as on the other side of the new border, Hindu refugees from west Punjab came to play an especially important role in anti-Muslim politics. This fear has helped strengthen the refugees’ identification with Pakistan, and therefore that of Punjab as a whole. Of the educated Punjabi migrants, a high proportion joined the officer corps. They played a particularly prominent role under General Zia-ul-Haq – himself from Jullundur in east Punjab, like his ISI commander, General Akhtar Rehman. A majority of the leadership of the violently anti-Shia Sipah-e-Sahaba Islamist militant group (now allied in revolt with the Pakistani Taleban) have also been from east Punjab.
The refugees therefore played a vital role in creating what Abida Husain has called, with some exaggeration, ‘Pakistan’s Prussian Bible Belt’: that is to say, the combination of tendencies towards economic dynamism, social mobility, militarist nationalism and Islamist chauvinism to be found in northern and central Punjab.
These tendencies, and the overall impact of the refugees, have been qualified however by much older traditions in Punjab, a mixture exemplified by the city of Lahore. As noted, the headquarters of Islamist radical groups