The origin and politics of the Seraiki movement
By Shafqat Tanvir Mirza
BEFORE one
comments on Riaz Missen’s piece ‘Seraiki nationalism in focus’
(Encounter, May 2) it is inevitable to quote Abdul Majeed Pirzada’s
remarks at an Awami Tehreek Conference on provincial autonomy held
at Hyderabad on May 10. He says: “Pakhtoons should not be alienated
because they were ‘natural allies’ of the Sindhis against the
Urdu-speaking people.” This is what can be termed a principle of
necessity, if not the law of necessity — a principle that sustains
the campaign against Punjab by the other three provinces in the
federation.
Once, the Bengalis were in a majority in Pakistan. Their majority
was snatched by the feudal West Pakistan and all the four provinces
combined to impose parity on them. And when the Bengalis won a
majority in the assembly, they were thrown out by the triangle of
the feudals, generals and the bureaucrats under the command of a
feudal leader from Sindh and an army general from the Frontier.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was given the task to confront the majority, and
he did it. The feudal lords from all the four provinces in West
Pakistan, in and out of his Pakistan People’s Party, were on his
back. The feudals were thus saved from the radical agrarian reforms
all the political parties which contested the 1970 election had
committed themselves to. The Bengalis had a 36-acre ceiling while we
still enjoy almost unlimited acreage.
Z.A. Bhutto was committed to radical agrarian reforms and other
labour-capital socialistic relationship. On that basis he swept the
polls in the Punjab districts of Rawalpindi, Jhelum, Lahore,
Gujranwala, Sialkot, Sheikhupura, Faisalabad, Sahiwal and the
present-day Sargodha. He was clean bowled in the feudal-dominated
districts where the Seraiki speaking people were in a majority and
they were: Attock, Mianwali, Khushab, Jhang, Dera Ghazi Khan and
Rajanpur. The PPP won overwhelmingly in Gujrat, Bahawalnagar, Multan
and Muzaffargarh.
After the separation of East Pakistan most of the Seraiki MNAs and
MPAs including Khosas, Legharis, Qureshis, Mazaris, Wattoos and
Nawabs of Bahawalpur joined the PPP and saved their fiefs and the
fear of the radical agrarian reforms subsided. However, the radical
political verdict from the central Punjab loomed large. After the
feudals of the Seraiki belt joined the PPP there was a conscious
effort to bifurcate Punjab into two provinces and after the failure
of the campaign for a separate Bahawalpur province, the language, or
the dialect, was made the basis for this bifurcation move.
The first all-Pakistan Seraiki Conference was convened in Multan
which was allegedly supported by the PPP Sindh chief minister and
many of the Sindhi intellectuals including Rasul Bukhsh Palejo
participated in it. But it ended in fiasco when some people in
Multan published and distributed a map of the Seraiki province which
included some of the Seraiki speaking areas of Sindh. The Sindhi
participants raised the slogan of Hosho Sheedi: ‘Sir daisoon Sindh
nah daisoon’ (I will give life but will never let go of Sindh) .
With that the Seraiki movement of Punjab abandoned the idea of
merging the Seraiki areas of Sindh in its proposed province, the
most common factor between the two being the feudal power.
To alienate central Punjab the slogan of local (Multani) and
non-local (Punjabi) was raised in 1962 elections by Sajjad Qureshi,
the sajjada nasheen of Bahauddin Zakria, who took on Farooq Sheikh,
an industrialist from Chiniot (part of Seraiki-speaking Jhang).
Qureshi also raised the point of Multani as a separate language in
the National Assembly. The word Seraiki was not in vogue in those
days but anyhow bureaucrats close to Ayub Khan, such as Qudrat Ullah
Shahab, allegedly supported Multani as a separate language.
Dr Tariq Rehman in his book Language and Politics in Pakistan,
writes: “According to the antagonists of Seraiki, a powerful
bureaucrat in General Ayub’s government, Qudrat Ullah Shahab,
patronised the writers of Seraiki, asking twenty of them to claim
that their language was different from Punjabi.” (P. 180).
Whether this is correct or not the fact is that the Writers Guild
was used by Shahab and Jamiluddin Aali, the two architects of the
Guild, to suppress the Lahore-based Punjabi Wing before the wing was
dissolved unconstitutionally.
The Guild was not the only forum where politics of this kind
flourished. Politicians also had their interests to watch. The Awami
National Party of the Frontier and the Pakistan National Party of
Balochistan formed their Seraiki units. Both these parties were
against the hegemony of Punjab. The nature of this alliance was
identical to what Mujeeb Pirzada has suggested in the context of the
Sindhi-Pukhtoon alliance.
The two major national parties — the Muslim League, of all colours
and hues, and the Pakistan People’s Party — have been reluctant to
give support to the Seraiki movement which emerged after the merger
of Bahawalpur state in Punjab following dismemberment of the
One-Unit. The ‘Bahawalpur Suba’ movement was not based on the
language issue but when it fizzled out after the 1970 election,
Multan became the centre of Seraiki activities.
One of the early protagonists of the Seraiki language, area and
perhaps a separate Seraiki province, was a senior irrigation
engineer Syed Noor Ali Zamin Haidri. His book, Mua’arif-i-Seriaki
(1972) forcefully argued that from time immemorial the area of
Pakistan had been ruled by the people from Sindh Sagar Doab and from
those who came from the western bank of the Indus. These areas, he
said, had produced much more superior rulers including Z.A. Bhutto,
who was the president of Pakistan at the time the book was
published, and Gen Ayub Khan.
Haidri’s list of able rulers was quite long, but exclusive. It
included names of Nawab of Kalabagh, Sir Sikander Hyat, Sir Khizr
Hyat, Sir Feroz Khan Noon, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani, Ghulam Mustafa
Khar, Gen Tikka Khan, Ayub Khuro, G.M. Syed, Pirzada Abdus Sattar
and Allah Buksh Soomro, etc. On the other hand he declared Ghulam
Muhammad, Chaudhry Muhammad Ali from Ravi and Jullunder Doaba and
Iftikhar Mamdot and Mumtaz Daultana (from the bank of river Sutlej)
as unfit by birth to be rulers.
Haidri quoted a Hadith attributed to the Prophet (PBUH) that only
Quresh were entitled to be the khalifas of the Muslims. He also
quoted the second Khalifa Hazrat Umar who was said to have governed
according to the Hadith. (It may be mentioned that Hazrat Umar was
the first to give representation to the Ansars or the locals of
Madina in the council). The line of argument led to a total
rejection of the Punjabi language and one of the stalwarts of
Multani-Seraiki, the late Dr. Mehr Abdul Haq, declared that Punjabi
was not the language of any part of Pakistan. This was linguistic
extremism based on the presumption that Punjabi was the language of
the Sikhs who had dethroned the Muslim ruler of Multan, Nawab
Muzaffar Khan in 1818. Thus, the issue was given a religious and
political complexion: Sikhs represented Punjabi while the Muslims of
the south Punjab or the province of Multan represented Seraiki.
Purely on linguistic basis, some of the British writers and civil
servants described Seraiki or Multani as Western Punjabi or Lehnda,
which was refuted by some other British scholars and students of
Punjabi language. C.F. Usborne, in 1905, wrote an article on Bulleh
Shah referring to the Gazetter of Multan and said: “It is hardly
true to say, as the writer of Multan Gazetter does, that the ballads
(kafis) are written in Multani dialect of the Punjabi language.
Undoubtedly they contain some forms of verbs which are peculiar to
that dialect, but they could probably be understood by any peasant
from Pindi to Delhi and from Delhi to Multan.”
Another modern protagonist of Seraiki, Dr Shackle says that ‘many
shared morphological details, as well as overall agreement in much
of the vocabulary and syntax, link it (Seraiki) quiet closely to
Punjabi with which it has a higher degree of mutual
intelligibility.” And Tariq Rehman is of the opinion: “The
linguistic fact seems to be that Seraiki and Punjabi are mutually
intelligible.”
Economic and political reasons must also be taken into account. Just
recall General Ziaul Haq’s period when the political aim of the
martial law regime was to divide the support of Mr Bhutto’s party in
its strongholds. The Mohajir Qaumi Movement was supposed to divide
Sindh on Urdu-speaking and Sindhi-speaking basis and on the same
basis Punjab was to be divided on the basis of dialect.
His regime, without consulting linguistic experts, recognised
Seraiki as an independent language in the 1980s which according to
Husain Ahmad Khan (Rethinking Punjab) was a triumph for Seraiki
political advocates and the intelligentsia. This was the period when
the Seraiki Qaumi Movement (SQM) emerged. According to Tariq Rahman
this was based on the successful model of MQM. The SQM had three
centres Karachi, Khanpur, Katora and Ahmadpur Sharqia.
Here, one may mention that many of the feudals of south Punjab who
had embraced the PPP after its coming to power had by now crossed
the floor and most of them participated in the 1985 non-party
election boycotted by the PPP. Unfortunately Mr Bhutto, in the 1977
election, had given the control of Punjab to the so-called Seraiki
lords like Nawab Muhammad Ahmad and Sadiq Qureshi plus Muhammad
Hayat Taman of Attock. It was against the original aims of the party
and jeopardised the original vote bank of the PPP in the province.
The feudal realities have not changed and Dr Ayesha Siddiqa who
hails from Bahawalpur, writes in her column, ‘Deadly social change’
(Dawn, May 1, 09): “This part of Punjab is prominent in terms of
large landownership and feudal lifestyle. This is also an area where
feudal institutions in terms of economic power merged with political
and spiritual power. So many political families are not just
significant due to their wealth and political power but because they
are connected to the shrines as well. The gradual institutionalising
of the power of the shrine has strengthened them rather than giving
same breathing space to ordinary people some of whom are moving in
the direction of rabid religious ideologies….The growing
radicalisation in southern Punjab shown up in the inability of the
state to carry out land reforms and shift the socioeconomic and
political power structure from a pre-capitalist society to a
capitalist one will have its consequences in the year to come.”
The utmost attempt of the feudals of the southern Punjab and Sindh
plus the Sardars of Balochistan and Khans of the Frontier would be
to avoid the move towards the radical economic and democratic
changes and in that the Seraiki province can play a big role to keep
intact the hegemony of the traditional politics of inheritance which
is threatened by the changes in other parts of Punjab and Sindh.
As far as the economic and social grievances of the Seraiki area are
concerned, the major responsibility for these lies with the big
landlords of the area for it is they who for most of the time were
in power in the province and the centre and failed to address them.
The clash between the two dialects of Punjabi (Punjabi and Seraiki
or Mohajir or local dialect) has also a political and economic
background to it. The main aim of the Seraiki province is to give
strength to the feudal Sindh, Sardari Balochistan and Khan-ruled
Frontier and their politics of inheritance. One of the serious
grievances is that the lands of the Seraiki areas are being given to
non-Seraiki people. If the land reforms are carried out in true
sense, the land will go to the person who is cultivating it and not
to the absentees.
One may remind Riaz Missen that when Daultana tried to touch a
subject as sensitive as the rights of the tenants the MLAs from the
Seraiki belt, under the leadership of Naubahar Shah, Budhan Shah and
Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan, raised an organisation to defend the big
landlords which, if memory serves one right, was named Zamindar
Bachao Morcha. And in their support Maulana Maudoodi and Ahmadi
khalifa Bashiruddin Mahmud authored books in support of the
unlimited rights of the landlords who were given propriety rights
over land by the British government (in the Mughal and Sikh period
the land was the property of the state).
DAWN:Sunday, May 24, 2009 |
