Pandit Nehru tried hard to persuade Josh Malihabadi not to migrate to Pakistan. We have it from various accounts that Josh sahab – who had ruled the hearts of millions of Indians, and still does of quite a few, as the poet of revolution (shaaer-i-inquilab) – was never at ease about his eventual decision to live in Karachi. There are many people like Josh who regretted choosing to go to Pakistan, not necessarily because they didn’t like their new neighbours but because they missed home. One of my grandmothers who died in Karachi was among them.
The tragedy of those from Punjab and Bengal, who had no choice but to leave their houses in a hurry or be killed by insane mobs, is even more heart wrenching. There is hardly a Punjabi home on either side of the border that didn’t experience the searing tragedy of the partition. Dharam Vir was my hostel warden at Jawaharlal Nehru University in the 1970s. His mother Devika Rani was 45 when the family migrated from Girot, a once idyllic village in Jhelum in 1947. She spoke only Punjabi of a certain dialect though she could understand Urdu and a bit of Hindi. It was not always easy for me to understand everything she said.
Yet I could never not be totally riveted to Devika Rani’s wizened old face, often imagining that the creases on her face contained countless unwritten chapters of history like the grooves of a gramophone record hold myriad sounds and music. Her words still ring in my ears to a query on partition: ‘Tenu ki dassan, puttar. Tarikh vich raj badalde si, raja badalda si. Ae ki raj badlya ke prajaa hi badal diti?’ (Son, history witnessed countless changes of kingdoms resulting in the change of kings. What kind of kingdom have we created, in which the people were changed?)
Do a headcount and you would very easily find a few million Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis who cannot hold back their tears at Devika Rani’s Brechtian fulminations on the partition. Now suppose Devika Rani (though she is no more) wanted to go back to her childhood home in Jhelum to spend the last few days of her life in what was once her very own land. There must be many Muslim Devika Ranis living in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Let’s suppose they too wanted to go across the borders to spend their remaining life in the environs from where they were rudely uprooted.
I would have thought that a scheme unveiled by the government of India in 2005 to allow people of Indian origin, popularly known as PIOs, to have dual citizenship should first and foremost apply to those who lived in the neighbourhood – in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. But the Indian cabinet in its wisdom decided to exclude Pakistanis and Bangladeshis from the purview of an otherwise sound idea. I think someone should ask India’s Supreme Court as to why the decision to exclude Bangladeshis and Pakistanis should not be considered communal, if also petty.This is not to say that every Pakistani or Bangladeshi is waiting with bated breath to be given an Indian passport. Far from it. On the contrary, a very large number of Pakistanis would probably frown at the idea of diluting their national pride by swearing allegiance to the Indian constitution, for that is what dual citizenship implies – it involves dual or multiple allegiances as the situation may require. As far as I am aware Pakistanis have a dual citizenship arrangement only with a handful of European countries. Indians will probably play on a wider canvass naturally.
But consider this. In a footnote in Gunnar Myrdal’s Asian Drama, Jawaharlal Nehru is quoted as saying that though he favoured some kind of a loose confederation with Pakistan, he felt discouraged to press it because of fears in Pakistan that India would swallow up its neighbour. From Ram Manohar Lohia to Lal Kishan Advani Indian politician of every hue has spoken about a federation or a confederation with Pakistan, often also with all the South Asian countries. Many NGOs have allocated budgets to study the negative and positive consequences of a Saarc federation. Is this the mindset that will get us there?
So what is the basis for singling out Pakistanis and Bangladeshis as ineligible for India’s dual membership move? The catchall word ‘security’ comes to mind. Perhaps the Indian cabinet considered inputs from its intelligence units to come to the conclusion that in this era of war on terror, euphemism for insidious whisper campaign against Muslims the world over, it would not be prudent to grant a passport with unrestricted travel privileges to citizens of those countries that are regarded as the epicentre of trouble. This is a patently false premise to draw an unwarranted distinction about those who are eligible and those that are not.
After all the ultimate decision to grant a passport, as is the case with visas, rests with an issuing government, and so it is with India. The Indian government, if it so chooses, can find a hundred legitimate or spurious reasons not to grant the facility to anyone it doesn’t like. In fact, it is a familiar phenomenon that many Indians – Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, or Christians – have to bribe lower division officials to get a passport or a government certificate. Clearly the government can stall access to passports by this or other forms of deterrence. Moreover, it could apply greater rigour or vigil in the case of its two neighbours.
In fact, that’s all the more reason why the principle behind the current stance seems to be questionable. If the government has its own filters to allow and disallow citizens or PIOs to get a passport or a dual citizenship then why the fear of the wrong people – let’s call them subversive people – being given the status? On the other hand, by making the overture to all people of Indian origin – regardless of their religion or the bitter history of partition – the Indian government would have taken a high moral ground on a core issue of immense emotive appeal. This is something I suspect the Quaid-i-Azam may have had in mind when he held out of hopes of visiting his home in Mumbai after the creation of Pakistan.
The assumption behind my plaint is that it is not an easy quest at all. To begin with anti-India hardliners in the Pakistani government would throw such a proposal out of the window. After all dual citizenship involves the consent of two sides. My guess is that such hardliners would not be in favour of even a Saarc-based initiative to confederate. The familiar fear of the big brother together with regional and geo-political stakes would need to be negotiated for any baby steps in this direction. Be that as it may, had India not acted small, it would have won a moral victory. Imagine a gathering lobby of friends of India in Pakistan pressing their government to agree to a dual citizenship with its biggest bete noire.
These are not outlandish ideas. Let me cite the precedence of Sajjad Zaheer, who was jailed by the British and later by Pakistan as a communist subversive. Why did Nehru allow him to return to India in 1955, a privilege denied today to the less ‘connected’ in Pakistan? Men and women like Salamat Ali and Fahmida Riaz were given asylum for years in India when they came here to escape Gen Zia ul Haq’s bigoted dictatorship. These are good precedences that need to be further built upon.
There was a very moving Shyam Benegal movie on the subject of partition – Mammo. It is a nickname given to Mehmooda Begum by her sisters. She marries a man from Lahore. After partition, she and her husband automatically become Pakistan citizens. Although childless, her marriage is a happy one until her husband’s death. Over property matters, Mammo is thrown out of the house by her relatives. She comes to India to stay with her only kin, her two sisters. Unable to extend her visa, she has to go back – political priorities defeat humanitarian ones. Devika Rani would have embraced Mammo for she had a big heart – big enough to live with the angst of an absurd reality that robbed her of her small perch on earth. The Indian government can learn a lesson or two from her. So should politicians and the NGOs clamouring for durable peace in South Asia.
The tragedy of those from Punjab and Bengal, who had no choice but to leave their houses in a hurry or be killed by insane mobs, is even more heart wrenching. There is hardly a Punjabi home on either side of the border that didn’t experience the searing tragedy of the partition. Dharam Vir was my hostel warden at Jawaharlal Nehru University in the 1970s. His mother Devika Rani was 45 when the family migrated from Girot, a once idyllic village in Jhelum in 1947. She spoke only Punjabi of a certain dialect though she could understand Urdu and a bit of Hindi. It was not always easy for me to understand everything she said.
Yet I could never not be totally riveted to Devika Rani’s wizened old face, often imagining that the creases on her face contained countless unwritten chapters of history like the grooves of a gramophone record hold myriad sounds and music. Her words still ring in my ears to a query on partition: ‘Tenu ki dassan, puttar. Tarikh vich raj badalde si, raja badalda si. Ae ki raj badlya ke prajaa hi badal diti?’ (Son, history witnessed countless changes of kingdoms resulting in the change of kings. What kind of kingdom have we created, in which the people were changed?)
Do a headcount and you would very easily find a few million Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis who cannot hold back their tears at Devika Rani’s Brechtian fulminations on the partition. Now suppose Devika Rani (though she is no more) wanted to go back to her childhood home in Jhelum to spend the last few days of her life in what was once her very own land. There must be many Muslim Devika Ranis living in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Let’s suppose they too wanted to go across the borders to spend their remaining life in the environs from where they were rudely uprooted.
I would have thought that a scheme unveiled by the government of India in 2005 to allow people of Indian origin, popularly known as PIOs, to have dual citizenship should first and foremost apply to those who lived in the neighbourhood – in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. But the Indian cabinet in its wisdom decided to exclude Pakistanis and Bangladeshis from the purview of an otherwise sound idea. I think someone should ask India’s Supreme Court as to why the decision to exclude Bangladeshis and Pakistanis should not be considered communal, if also petty.This is not to say that every Pakistani or Bangladeshi is waiting with bated breath to be given an Indian passport. Far from it. On the contrary, a very large number of Pakistanis would probably frown at the idea of diluting their national pride by swearing allegiance to the Indian constitution, for that is what dual citizenship implies – it involves dual or multiple allegiances as the situation may require. As far as I am aware Pakistanis have a dual citizenship arrangement only with a handful of European countries. Indians will probably play on a wider canvass naturally.
But consider this. In a footnote in Gunnar Myrdal’s Asian Drama, Jawaharlal Nehru is quoted as saying that though he favoured some kind of a loose confederation with Pakistan, he felt discouraged to press it because of fears in Pakistan that India would swallow up its neighbour. From Ram Manohar Lohia to Lal Kishan Advani Indian politician of every hue has spoken about a federation or a confederation with Pakistan, often also with all the South Asian countries. Many NGOs have allocated budgets to study the negative and positive consequences of a Saarc federation. Is this the mindset that will get us there?
So what is the basis for singling out Pakistanis and Bangladeshis as ineligible for India’s dual membership move? The catchall word ‘security’ comes to mind. Perhaps the Indian cabinet considered inputs from its intelligence units to come to the conclusion that in this era of war on terror, euphemism for insidious whisper campaign against Muslims the world over, it would not be prudent to grant a passport with unrestricted travel privileges to citizens of those countries that are regarded as the epicentre of trouble. This is a patently false premise to draw an unwarranted distinction about those who are eligible and those that are not.
After all the ultimate decision to grant a passport, as is the case with visas, rests with an issuing government, and so it is with India. The Indian government, if it so chooses, can find a hundred legitimate or spurious reasons not to grant the facility to anyone it doesn’t like. In fact, it is a familiar phenomenon that many Indians – Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, or Christians – have to bribe lower division officials to get a passport or a government certificate. Clearly the government can stall access to passports by this or other forms of deterrence. Moreover, it could apply greater rigour or vigil in the case of its two neighbours.
In fact, that’s all the more reason why the principle behind the current stance seems to be questionable. If the government has its own filters to allow and disallow citizens or PIOs to get a passport or a dual citizenship then why the fear of the wrong people – let’s call them subversive people – being given the status? On the other hand, by making the overture to all people of Indian origin – regardless of their religion or the bitter history of partition – the Indian government would have taken a high moral ground on a core issue of immense emotive appeal. This is something I suspect the Quaid-i-Azam may have had in mind when he held out of hopes of visiting his home in Mumbai after the creation of Pakistan.
The assumption behind my plaint is that it is not an easy quest at all. To begin with anti-India hardliners in the Pakistani government would throw such a proposal out of the window. After all dual citizenship involves the consent of two sides. My guess is that such hardliners would not be in favour of even a Saarc-based initiative to confederate. The familiar fear of the big brother together with regional and geo-political stakes would need to be negotiated for any baby steps in this direction. Be that as it may, had India not acted small, it would have won a moral victory. Imagine a gathering lobby of friends of India in Pakistan pressing their government to agree to a dual citizenship with its biggest bete noire.
These are not outlandish ideas. Let me cite the precedence of Sajjad Zaheer, who was jailed by the British and later by Pakistan as a communist subversive. Why did Nehru allow him to return to India in 1955, a privilege denied today to the less ‘connected’ in Pakistan? Men and women like Salamat Ali and Fahmida Riaz were given asylum for years in India when they came here to escape Gen Zia ul Haq’s bigoted dictatorship. These are good precedences that need to be further built upon.
There was a very moving Shyam Benegal movie on the subject of partition – Mammo. It is a nickname given to Mehmooda Begum by her sisters. She marries a man from Lahore. After partition, she and her husband automatically become Pakistan citizens. Although childless, her marriage is a happy one until her husband’s death. Over property matters, Mammo is thrown out of the house by her relatives. She comes to India to stay with her only kin, her two sisters. Unable to extend her visa, she has to go back – political priorities defeat humanitarian ones. Devika Rani would have embraced Mammo for she had a big heart – big enough to live with the angst of an absurd reality that robbed her of her small perch on earth. The Indian government can learn a lesson or two from her. So should politicians and the NGOs clamouring for durable peace in South Asia.
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