Punjab Quotes
He was echoing proposals that he made in the Delhi Emergency Committee that had been called to cope with the butchery and murder when the Hindus and Sikhs were trying to leave the areas that were to be part of Pakistan under the Partition and the retaliations against the Delhi Muslims who were trying to flee to the new Pakistan. Unfortunately, the Muslim leadership did not want such a truce as while the land had been partitioned, Indian Money, military equipment, and other resources were yet to be divided and the Muslim leaders who had been so successful playing the violence card to gain and independent Pakistan, did not want to give up that option in the remainder of the division of India. Also, it was not at all clear that the Muslim political leaders could even then control the mobs who they had already whipped up to violence.
The Punjab had been partitioned into a Pakistani part and an Indian part. The latter was a major province of the new state. But in the political process of drawing the boundaries, Jinnah and other Muslim leaders had used fanatic Muslim terrorists to massacre Sikhs and Hindus to ethnically cleanse areas and intimidate the ruling Indian Congress Party and the British government to obtain more area and resources for the Muslim state. However, at this point he had to govern, and there were still many Sikhs and Hindus as well as Christians and Buddhists in the new Muslim state. Jinnah's new state needed all the help it could get from the U. S. and others, and Jinnah started sounding like a passionate democrat. On paper religious freedom was guaranteed in Pakistan. However Pakistan became one of the most dangerous countries in the world for non-Muslims. Most historians agree that the Muslim terrorism in the short run had worked, as it would have been unlikely that India would have been partitioned in the absence of violence. However, it set in motion a cultural pattern of religious hate, bigotry, intolerance, violence and murder which would plague Pakistan thereafter. The politicians throughout the country's history have tried to use the Muslim religious, fundamentalist, extremists for their purposes only to find that the fanatics were out of control and the entire Pakistani population has lived in fear, lest an extremist decide that what they did or say was inimical to Islam and assassinate him or her. They have assassinated even the highest levels of politicians—President, Governors of Provinces, National Legislatures as well as Journalists, writers and academics. But the average Pakistani citizen has always been at risk of brutal murder with hundreds killed every year in an atmosphere of total impunity for the murderers. They have even murdered married women who had been raped on the grounds that they were adulterers and were therefore stoned.
The attitude of the non-Muslims at that time was based on the Muslim attacks in the Punjab on Sikhs where entire Sikh villages and neighborhoods in towns and cities were murdered—every man woman and child. In many cases women were first raped. The Muslims had been whipped up by the leaders of the Muslim League to put terrorist pressure on the Sikh, Hindu and British to meet the League's political and territorial demands for an Independent Pakistan. Soon there was retaliation in kind and there were many Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims engaged in internecine slaughter and behaving "little better than animals".
The Punjab, like Afghanistan and some other areas had no real tradition of government. The Sikhs of the Punjab had initiated a war with the British Colonial Empire—The 1st Anglo-Sikh War—which ended with a decisive British victory and a peace treaty where the rulers of the Punjab agreed to keep the peace. However, they really could not control the population and some Sikhs again attacked British and Muslim interests. The Governor-General reported that treaties and commitments with the Punjab leaders really meant little. The British also won the 2nd Anglo-Sikh War-. The Governor-General was determined that there would not be a 3rd war with the Sikhs of the Punjab.
The fear of the Sikhs was that if the Punjab became a part of the new Muslim State of Pakistan, they would not be allowed to practice their religion and that the new Islamic state would discriminate against non-Muslims. They were successful in keeping the Punjab as a part of India, and turned out to have been right about the intolerance of the new Muslim state.
