London Post

Hamid Mir

He was neither a Hindu nor a Muslim, but a British Christian. Journalism brought him from Britain to India, and through hard work and ability, he became editor of the renowned English-language daily The Statesman of Calcutta in 1942. His access extended not only to the corridors of British power but also to the drawing rooms of the leading figures of the Congress and the Muslim League. Yet these connections never influenced his writing. His name was Ian Melville Stephens, and he was close to both Mahatma Gandhi and Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
What Stephens wrote after the partition of 1947 about the massacres in Bengal, Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir is still regarded as an important and authoritative historical record. As long as Gandhi lived, Stephens faced little trouble in Calcutta. After Gandhi’s assassination, it became difficult to write the truth in Nehru’s India. His reporting on the killings in Jammu and Kashmir, and his criticism of the Indian government’s Kashmir policy, proved intolerable to the world’s largest democracy. In 1951, under pressure from the Indian government, the editor of The Statesman of Calcutta was forced to resign and return to Britain.
Indian government wanted him out because Stephens had prominently reported the organised massacre of Muslims in occupied Jammu on November 5 and 6, 1947, and had continued to follow the story for the next three or four years. Even today, when the bloodshed of partition is discussed, usually only Bengal and Punjab are mentioned. Jammu and Kashmir is left out. Stephens was one of the few journalists who gave equal weight to the killings in Bengal in 1946 and in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir in 1947. He put the number of Muslims killed in Jammu alone in October and November 1947 at 237,000, a figure higher than the number of Muslims killed in Bosnia (1995) and Gaza (2026) in the recent past.
Stephens repeatedly wrote that the Indian state had patronised an organised massacre in Jammu and Kashmir to turn the Muslim majority into a minority, and that no investigation was being held. Patel began pressing The Statesman of Calcutta’s management to dismiss him. The management could not withstand the pressure for long, and Stephens left the paper. But he then wrote books, and in them made a permanent part of history the very truth that the Indian government had him fired to conceal.
Stephens had witnessed at close quarters the massacre in Calcutta in August 1946 and the violence in Noakhali in October 1946. He spent considerable time in Noakhali with Gandhi, who stayed there for many days to quell the riots. He was aware of the role of the RSS in the violence in Bengal and Bihar, so when the massacre took place in occupied Jammu in November 1947, his pen began to pursue the RSS. He discussed the killings with Indian and Pakistani officials, including Jinnah.
After sacrificing his job, he wrote Horned Moon, a travelogue about India, Afghanistan and Jammu and Kashmir that also mentions the Jammu massacre. In a second book, Pakistan, he set out the details of the killings. Every year on November 6th, when Jammu Martyrs Day is observed, Stephens is remembered as the man who saved this horrific massacre from disappearing into the dust of history.
When Stephens began exposing the massacre carried out under the patronage of the Indian state, some Indian intellectuals described it as a reaction to the October 1947 invasion of occupied Jammu and Kashmir by Pashtun tribesmen. The historical record contradicts this claim. The RSS had planned a similar massacre in Lahore in July 1947, much like the one carried out in occupied Jammu on November 5th and 6th.
Dr Saeed Ahmad Malik’s book 1947 Ka Muslim Qatl-e-Aam (The Muslim Massacre of 1947) records that Maulvi Ziauddin, a cousin of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and a member of the Congress, learned that the Congress and the RSS had together planned a massacre of Muslims in Lahore. He passed this information to a Muslim officer of the Lahore police. One day in July 1947, police from Mochi Gate police station raided Shah Alami Gate and arrested the RSS commander Raja Ram Singh with weapons and hand grenades. Teja Singh, a retired judge of the Lahore High Court, was also involved, using Walton Airport to bring weapons from Delhi to Lahore. Under the plan, 200,000 Muslims in Lahore were to be killed. It could not be carried out in Lahore, but a few months later it was carried out in occupied Jammu.
On 19 July 1947, the Muslim Conference, an ally of the Muslim League, resolved at its Srinagar session to accede to Pakistan. The Dogra army of Maharaja Hari Singh then began massacres in several parts of Jammu and Kashmir. In response, Muslims rose in revolt from Poonch, Bagh and Muzaffarabad to Mirpur. On September 6, 1947, on the orders of Major Khajoor Singh of the Dogra army, the Muslim Conference leader Syed Khadim Hussain Shah was publicly shot dead in Bagh. In those same days, Muslims were killed in the Ustad da Mohalla and Pathanan da Mohalla neighbourhoods of occupied Jammu. The Dogra army and the RSS had begun burning Muslim villages around Jammu well before the Pashtun tribesmen arrived in October 1947.
Chaudhry Rahim Dad, former Chief Justice of the Azad Kashmir Supreme Court, writes in his Urdu autobiography Naqoosh-e-Rahim that in 1947 he himself contacted the tribesmen through a Pashtun from Kohat named Nazir Gul to fight the Dogra army, and also arranged rifles for them. The Muslims of Jammu, by contrast, were unarmed. Their leader, Chaudhry Ghulam Abbas, was in jail, and Muslim police officials in Jammu had been disarmed by the Dogra army. The weapons of Jammu’s Muslims were confiscated, and they were promised safe transport to Sialkot in lorries. The betrayal and the massacre that followed were documented, with the help of eyewitnesses, by Muhammad Yusuf Saraf, former Chief Justice of the Azad Kashmir High Court, in his book Kashmiris Fight for Freedom.
In 2004, I heard many harrowing accounts of the massacre from an eyewitness, Ved Bhasin, editor of the Kashmir Times of Srinagar, when he visited Pakistan with Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He was a young man in 1947, and when he was asked to join a private army formed to kill Muslims, he refused. He passed away in 2015. The paper is now edited by his daughter, Anuradha Bhasin, who has recently written A Dismantled State: The Untold Story of Kashmir After Article 370. She argues that the BJP government is pursuing a plan to turn the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir into a minority. Reading it, one understands that the massacre that began on November 5th and 6th,1947 continues in Jammu and Kashmir even today, and that there is no one to stop it.

Suhail warraich

There is a world of difference between a mere scribbler and Bilawal Bhutto. The latter is far more influential, well-informed, and knowledgeable than the discredited journalist. Regarding the issue of new provinces, Bilawal has stated that a “full stop” has been placed on the debate an interpretation captured by a cartoonist who depicted Bilawal standing atop the grave of the “new provinces” proposal. While Bilawal Bhutto’s statement generally implies that the chapter on new provinces has been closed, he may have misidentified the punctuation mark; what he took for a “full stop” is, in fact, a “comma.” The matter of new provinces was merely deferred temporarily, but the deadline for legislation on this issue set for before March 2027 remains in place.
There has been no shift in the underlying intent to create new provinces. Although the “discredited journalist” has expressed reservations and disagreements regarding this proposal, the facts remain the facts. Reports indicate that the PML-N has agreed to the creation of new provinces in Punjab and is prepared to offer full support and cooperation for the necessary legislation. The condition, however, is that these new provinces would be established following the 2029 elections. While no final decision has been reached regarding the exact number of new provinces to be carved out of Punjab, the proposal to divide the province into four separate entities is gaining the most traction within high-level circles. The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) has no objection to the creation of provinces within Punjab; in fact, the PPP, Jamaat-e-Islami, and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf have already effectively acknowledged the concept of new provinces by establishing separate provincial organisational structures for South Punjab and Central Punjab.
The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) continues to harbour strong objections and reservations regarding the division of Sindh. Bilawal Bhutto has openly voiced these concerns, and his statement in which he declared a “full stop” to the matter reflected his relief that the plan had supposedly been abandoned. However, some PPP leaders prefer to seek a middle ground rather than engage in a confrontation with the establishment over this issue. A proposal has been put forward to designate Islamabad, Gwadar, and Karachi as federal territories, while allowing Karachi to continue serving as the capital of Sindh much like the city of Chandigarh in India. It is worth noting that when the Indian state of Punjab was divided into three parts, Chandigarh was designated as the capital for two of the resulting states, while itself remaining a Union Territory (a federal territory). The proposal for dividing rural Sindh suggests structuring the new provinces in such a way that each includes both underdeveloped areas and developed urban centres. In Balochistan, the PPP’s Chief Minister, Sarfraz Bugti, has already agreed to the creation of new provinces. It is understood that any provincial reorganization within Balochistan will be designed to ensure a significant presence of both Baloch and Pashtun populations in every provincial unit.
In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, given the current imposition of Governor’s Rule and a state of emergency, there is no likelihood of any resistance against the creation of new provinces. Nevertheless, Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman who leads the second-largest political force in the province does not currently consider this an opportune time for the formation of new provinces. Given these preparations, Bilawal Bhutto’s claim of placing a “full stop” on the project appears inaccurate; while there may be “commas” (pauses) in the process, the work remains very much ongoing.
Examining the political dimension of this matter, the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) the primary stakeholder within the government has agreed to the establishment of new provinces, as proposed by the ‘establishment’ (the powers that be), despite harbouring certain reservations. The sole condition stipulated is that these new provinces be created only after the 2029 general elections. This timeline implies that over the next two to two-and-a-half years, Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif aims to cultivate sufficient goodwill by insulating her development initiatives and projects from political interference to ensure that her party secures power in the four (or at least three) new provinces carved out of Punjab. The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), the other major political stakeholder in the current system, finds itself in a state of deep indecision: agreeing to the division of Sindh would effectively dismantle its political base, while continuing to oppose the creation of new provinces could lead to a prolonged exclusion from power, alongside the prospect of facing rigorous accountability, as has been the case in the past.
Regarding the sensitive issue of creating new provinces, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has historically been in favour. However, given the current climate and considering the possibility that the PPP might withhold its support or remain indecisive one might wonder if the PTI could leverage its cooperation in this process to secure concessions from the establishment for both its incarcerated founder and the party itself. While some observers suggest that the prevailing discourse points toward a potential reconciliation or settlement, there is currently no indication that the party’s founder is open to any such reconciliation or to supporting the establishment’s plan for the creation of new provinces.
The parliamentary leadership of Tehreek-e-Insaf appears inclined to secure concessions for itself by supporting the creation of new provinces; however, it is expected that the party’s founder will not permit such an arrangement. If any door to reconciliation were to open, it would likely be through Bushra Imran, she is the only person capable of persuading the founder to agree to any such understanding, compromise, or deal. Even if, with the founder’s consent, Tehreek-e-Insaf were to vote in favour of the government’s proposal for new provinces, how could a reconciliation between the PML-N and the founder come about? While the ‘establishment’ is not a candidate for the office of Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif and Imran Khan are direct rivals vying for the very same seat; how, then, could a reconciliation between them be possible? Furthermore, would such a move casting a vote in this manner ultimately benefit or harm Tehreek-e-Insaf’s electoral politics and its established narrative? Given the aggressive stance adopted by the party’s “brave” (yet fugitive) YouTubers, they would almost certainly tear apart any reconciliation whether sanctioned by the founder or not within their own narrative, just as they previously savaged the conciliatory attitudes displayed by Barrister Gohar Khan, Gandapur, and Afridi.
The reality is that the legislative process regarding the creation of new provinces will not be easy for any political party. Tehreek-e-Insaf is already grappling with significant challenges; if it supports the government on this legislation, its political credibility will be called into question, yet if it withholds support, its difficulties will only intensify. This phase will be equally challenging for the PML-N. If the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) refuses to cooperate and the PML-N is forced to seek Tehreek-e-Insaf’s support for this legislation, how would these two parties which have been locked in direct confrontation for years justify such mutual support to their respective bases? And how will they manage to appease their respective ‘eagles’ (powerful backers/masters)? The easiest path would be for the alliance between the Peoples Party and the ‘Noon’ (PML-N) to remain intact, or for members of the Tehreek-e-Insaf to support this legislation even against the wishes of their founding leader. Naturally, such an act would be construed as a rebellion against both the party and its founder, and those involved would be denied party tickets in future elections. This is, in fact, a major reason why no such rebellion has occurred within the Tehreek-e-Insaf.
The remaining two months of this year, along with the first three months of the next, will prove highly significant regarding the political parties’ responses to the issue of new provinces. The political conduct displayed during these five months will shape the future of politics, influence the 2029 elections, determine the nature of any potential national or caretaker government, and ultimately decide who will hold power in the future.