Bahawalpur by Anabel Lloyd

Author:Anabel Lloyd [Loyd, Anabel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353057435
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2020-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

10

PAKISTAN

Seventy years later, the tearing apart of the subcontinent in the violence of Partition appears not only as the pain-filled birth process of a new country but also the shrugging off of millennia of Indian history. That long narrative should have remained as much a part of Pakistan and the memory of its people as of India and hers. However, in India, Independence was merely the end of one more invading empire that would itself disappear, one more episode in a far longer story. In Pakistan, history ended with Partition, Pakistan Zindabad. Meanwhile, the servants of that last empire continued for the time being to busy themselves in the separate affairs of two countries. When the new finance minister arrived in his new office in Karachi, the capital of his new country, on 15 August 1947, he found nothing there except one table. The treasury was almost as bare.

Although Pakistan was owed 18.75 per cent of the current cash balances in Delhi, Rs 750 million, to be paid in two instalments, the country was in immediate debt to the tune of almost Rs 400 million and had hardly enough cash to pay the army for four months. governor general Jinnah’s loan of Rs 200 million from the nizam of Hyderabad is recorded. His close relationship with the wealthy nawab of Bahawalpur yielded a further Rs 7 crore (70,000,000), funds that were more in the nature of a gift, both to the Quaid and to the new Muslim nation. All the salaries of government departments for one month were also met by Bahawalpur. Given Penderel Moon’s concerns about the Bahawalpur state finances, it seems likely that much of the funding was supplied from the nawab’s personal wealth, or from the confluence that had been of such concern to the British authorities in the past, where state and royal treasuries merged. For a brief period of independence, Bahawalpur was the gift that kept on giving, until it disappeared. If Jinnah was more favourably inclined towards the princes than the new regime in India, any idea of their nominally independent states surviving within Pakistan for long, in the new world after August 1947, now seems incredible. Especially so after Jinnah died in September 1948.

The states and frontier regions ministry (SAFRON) was set up in July 1948 under Jinnah himself while several experienced old-style India hands, Pakistani and British, initially became governors or commissioners in the Pakistan princely states. Yaqoob Khan Bangash described the integration of the princely states into Pakistan, pointing out that the appointment of prime ministers of states had always been a contentious issue between rulers and the political department. The British, we know, had latterly been particularly keen to have a hand on, if not a hand in, appointments in Bahawalpur, to safeguard their financial interest in the state. The Pakistan government equally wished to exercise a level of control over any state. In the case of Bahawalpur, where the army was of considerable strength, there was an additional imperative to bring such a regular force under government control.

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