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Khizr Tiwana, the Punjab Unionist Party and the Partition of India The Proud Premier of the Punjab Khizr Tiwana, the Punjab Unionist Party and the Partition of India Ian Talbot i~ ~~o~1~~n~~:up LONDON AND NEW YORK First Published in 1996 by Curzon Press Published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY, 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1996 Ian Talbot Typeset in Sabon by LaserScript Ltd, Mitcham All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 13: 978-0-700-70427-9 (hbk) Contents Preface vii Foreword IX Dr. L.M. Singh vi. Indian High Commissioner in the UK List of Abbreviations Xlll Introduction 1 Part One Inheritance 1 The Tiwanas of Shahpur 12 2 Father and Son 36 3 The Unionist Party 51 Part Two The Pinnacle of Power 4 Apprentice to Power 67 5 Inheriting the Crown 83 6 Leader in War and Peace 99 Part Three The Passing of a World 7 Sailing in Two Boats 111 8 'Pakistan Zindabad' 129 9 General Without an Army 145 Epilogue 167 Conclusion 177 Glossary 182 Select Bibliography 184 Index 190 v This page intentionally left blank Preface The mid-1990s provide a good vantage point for a reconsideration of the Punjab Unionist Party and its last leader, Khizr Hayat Khan Tiwana. Khizr remains a little studied and much misunderstood figure who fits uneasily in both Indian and Pakistani historio­ graphy of the freedom movement against the Raj. This volume argues that his career deserves serious evaluation not just because of the rapid approaching golden jubilee of the partition of India which he so steadfastly opposed. But because of the insights it provides into the ability of consociational devices to maintain stability in highly segmented socities. Indian and Pakistani experi­ ences of recent communal and ethnic conflict call for a serious examination of the prescription of consociational power-sharing. The Unionist experience of the 1940s provides a key historical case study for such an evaluation. Khizr's career is likely to become of increasing interest in the emerging debate on consociationalism. This work has grown out of a number of years study of the Punjab and its peoples and the emergence of Pakistan. I am deeply indebted to a large number of people who have helped and encouraged me during this period. Thanks go to such doyens of Punjab history as Clive Dewey, Craig Baxter, Iftikhar Malik and David Gilmartin. I also owe an immense debt to Francis Robinson who introduced me to research on South Asia more years ago now than I care to remember. I am much obliged for the work of the Librarians and Staff of The India Office Library, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Southampton University Library, Chicago University Library and the South Asia Institute Library, Heidelberg University. I must thank Dietmar Rothermund for his kind invitation to work in the latter institution. VB Khizr Tiwana, the Punjab Unionist Party and the Partition of India I am especially grateful to my friend and colleague Gurharpal Singh who encouraged me to delve into the literature on consociationalism and political accommodation. This interest was further stimulated by a chance meeting with Arend Lijphart at the India International Centre in New Delhi. Mr. K.Y.F. Morton, Mr.C.H. Barry, Mr. R.A.F. Holroyd, Alan Campbell-Johnson, Stuart Abbott, Swaran Singh, Azim Husain, Barkat Hayat, Narinder Saroop and Justice Kalwant Singh Tiwana all gave generously of their time during the preparation of the manuscript. Dr Manohar Sondhi, Pran Neville and Bikram Singh acted as the perfect hosts during a brief visit to New Delhi. I must especially thank Nazar Tiwana for the great trouble he has taken in helping me with my research and for his frienship and gracious hospitality. Finally, I am grateful for the comments of numerous colleagues over the years. Any errors of fact or omissions are my responsibility alone. Coventry, May 1995 Ian Talbot Vlll Foreword Dr. Ian Talbot's study "Khizr Tiwana, the Unionist Party and the Partition of India" reflects on the well known maxim of Carlyle that history is a series of innumerable biographies. In a similar vein, Emerson had observed that there was probably no history, only biography. Dr. Talbot's study however is not only political biography and history, it is much more. It is an inter-disciplinary study which also has the advantage of being an absorbing narrative of the life and time of Sir Khizr Hayat Khan Tiwana, a biography which constitutes the stuff of history and political sociology without which the traumatic event of the partition of India in 1947 can never be fully comprehended. Describing the backdrop of Sir Khizr's patrimony and political inheritance, his ascendancy to the premiership of Punjab and the tragic denouement of the frustration of Unionist politics in Punjab which paved the way for the partition of India, Dr. Talbot has made a significant contribution to the study of an extremely complex and difficult period in the history of modern undivided India which becomes increasingly obscure with the passage of time. I believe that the history of that period has not ceased to be relevant. Indeed, it has some valuable lessons and insights to offer even at this distance of time if we are disposed to fathom the social and psychological depths of that era which drew to a close with the partition of India but which appears to have transmitted some of its genes to the post-partition era both in India and Pakistan. Dr. Talbot's study throws considerable light on the dynamics and deadlocks in the pre-partition politics of the Punjab. Its strength is its biographical focus which provides an authentic understanding of the ground realities of class, caste, religion and politics. The story of the Tiwanas of Shahpur, culled and woven painstakingly lX Khizr Tiwana, the Punjab Unionist Party and the Partition of India and objectively by Dr. Talbot, is the story of an important landowning family and its influence and power in the first half of the twentieth century. In a fascinating narrative, the author not only profiles the personal disposition, educational background and political ideas of Sir Khizr but also delineates the matrix which shaped Sir Khizr's life and outlook and the forces with which he had to contend. Dr. Talbot's biography of Sir Khizr is divided in three parts, Inheritance, Pinnacle of Power and the Passing of a World. Each part is engaging in its own way and tells the story of a phase in the life of Khizr Tiwana as indeed of the changing political scene in India. The last part of the book, The Passing of a World, reads somewhat like a Greek tragedy and Sir Khizr emerges as a tragic hero cast adrift by the ruthless forces of religious communalism unleashed by the Muslim League in India which left Sir Khizr in the predicament of being a "General without an Army". A scion of a prominent landowning family with a conspicuous history of loyalty to the Raj, Sir Khizr was not really a political animal. He was a pragmatist. He was too much the patron­ aristocrat to be a demagogue and a rabble rouser. He was not a mass leader but a practical administrator who wanted to do good for his people in the spirit of noblesse oblige. He stepped into the shoes of the Unionist Premier of ~he Punjab, Sir Sikander who died suddenly at the age of fifty in 1942. On that occasion, Sir Khizr declared: "The best way to perpetuate the memory of the departed leader is to continue the work which was dear to heart, namely protection of communal harmony and unconditional support for the prosecution of the war" (emphasis added). He pursued those two objectives singlemindedly during his term of office but Sir Khizr's goal of communal harmony and the idea of a working coalition based on composite culture, however, proved to be too ad-hoc and quite unequal to the crusading battle cry of religious separatism spearheaded by the Muslim League. As Sir Bertrand Glancy, Governor of the Punjab who had genuine affection for Sir Khizr said in a perceptive 'end of the term report', "Khizr has no inclination to imitate Congress tactics and clamour for the independence of India nor abase himself to Jinnah and cry aloud for Pakistan. The pro-Zamindar campaign of the Unionist Party with its concomitant agrarian legislation has for the present more or less exhausted itself." Sir Khizr's liability in the Unionist legacy was his predecessor's x Foreword pact with Jinnah's Muslim League under which national politics were ceded to the League in exchange for the autonomy of the Unionist pattern of power-sharing) e.g. with Jats under Sir Chotu Ram) in the Punjab. The Unionists were closer to the National Congress in their rejection of narrow and divisive communalism, but they did not join hands in time to provide a common front against the League. When the Muslim League became more strident and more fanatical in its separatist demands, and when it gained somewhat wider public support among the Muslims of Punjab, the integrity and the autonomy of Sir Khizr's party came under serious threat.

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