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"The Punjab Story, 1940-1947" by Dr. Waheed Ahmad
It is sometimes suggested it would be more creditable for a historian to write historical narration interpreting and analyzing events. However, written account represents only a writer’s version which may leave gaps and, at places, descriptions may be even doubted and questioned. As against this, publishing documents have special purpose and utility. Here, events and event-makers speak for themselves through text. Printing the original text of papers, especially of a person of Jinnah’s stature, has a unique value. Many titbits and half-baked stories about Jinnah remain afloat. Many of them are distortion and without foundation, presenting “a picture of the Quaid different from what he really was”. It was Jinnah’s wish that his papers remained closed for twenty years, then published so that “the Musalmans must know the difficulties we faced in organizing them, and the details of how the battle for Pakistan was fought and won”. It is, therefore, pertinent that, following Jinnah’s wish, this treasured text is published without further delay. The papers contain primarily letters and documents from Jinnah’s own followers, and his brief replies. The fascinating story of Jinnah and the All India Muslim League is graphically revealed in them. It is therefore useful that the story of these papers, the process of their creation, their shift from Delhi to Karachi and thence to Islamabad is also told. The Shamsul Hasan Collection comprises 72 volumes, divided province-wise and also subject-wise. Among these, five volumes deal exclusively with the undivided province of the Punjab of 1940-1047. It was thought appropriate to take up the publication of the volumes province-wise, among these, the province of the Punjab to be taken up first. The next in the line-up are the provinces of Sindh, Baluchistan and the N.-W.F.P., then the rest of India and other subjects. Elections having concluded, the Muslim League won overwhelmingly all over India, including Punjab where it captured 79 out of 86 Muslim seats in the House of 175 securing 65.3%. This victory, however, did not give the League the required magic legislative number to enable it to form government independently because of the weightage allowed to Hindus and Sikhs under Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s Communal Award of August 1932. Instead, the rickety Tiwana coalition was resurrected through the machination of the Congress President, Abul Kalam Azad. In consequence, the Leaguers protested, demonstrated and courted arrests. Yet the Tiwana government lived, limpingly though, until panicked Tiwana returned to Lahore from Delhi post-haste, released Muslim League detainees, withdrew ban on the Muslim League National Guard and resigned on 2 March 1947 bringing down the entire ramshackle Unionist-Akali-Congress coalition. In the aftermath, the ex-coalition partners, Congressmen and Sikhs, threatened violence and sought to prevent the Muslim League from forming government. They preferred the Section 93 regime of the Government of India Act, 1935, which lasted until Partition in August 1947. The documents printed on the pages that follow deal with the related events, as regards the concern and activities of Muslims in the Punjab preceding Pakistan’s birth, and Jinnah’s unique role in leading them to their cherished goal. One of the constant factors which dominated the Muslim politics was Jinnah’s failing health; prayers offered for his recovery were overwhelming. He was aware of the anti-League activities and the need for his personal intervention, but Punjab, despite its uniqueness, was only one area of Jinnah’s worry in the vast swathe of the Indian political landscape, and, with little energy left in him, he could not oblige his Punjab supporters by his frequent visits to the province. It may be noted that the papers in the Shamsul Hasan Collection did not contain all of Jinnah’s correspondence in the period of 1940-1947. There are substantial missing gaps. A large number of documents relating to Jinnah are to be found in the Quaid-i-Azam Papers (nearly 150,000 sheets) and in the All India Muslim League papers (over 600 volumes), all deposited at the National Archives of Pakistan, Islamabad. It may be safely stated, however, that the documents in the Shamsul Hasan Collection that follow explain the history of the Pakistan movement as regards the Punjab sufficiently meaningfully. After the Collection passed on to Syed Shamsul Hasan’s custody, he named it as the “Shamsul Hasan Collection to differentiate [it] from the other collections” of Jinnah papers. Their value as historical source material can hardly be overstated. Shamsul Hasan devoted his entire life and resources to the cause of the All India Muslim League which he had joined in 1914. He died in Karachi in 1981. Shamsul Hasan’s importance and role in organizing and functioning of the All India Muslim League was much more than his junior position in the organization would suggest. Back in Delhi to fetch these papers at the Quaid’s behest, Shamsul Hasan was arrested by the Congress-led Delhi administration, later released on intervention by sympathetic influential people. The inheritor of the Private Secretary to Mr. Jinnah assets was Khalid Shamsul Hasan. He, died in 1995, and the family’s archival asset passed on to his brother Zahid. I succeeded in persuading Zahid to allow that the Collection be shifted to the National Documentation Wing of the Cabinet Division in Islamabad, in 2005, on condition that it remained closed until published. It would be relevant to mention that while the Collection stayed jealously preserved and guarded by Zahid, a serious suggestion was made by two powerful high-profile elements in Islamabad that the simplest procedure to acquire the Collection would be to authorize them to organize a police raid on Zahid’s home and the volumes be lifted forcefully. The then Cabinet Secretary, to whom the suggestion was given, however, turned down the callously crude course justifiably bluntly. The Government of Pakistan conferred Sitara-i-Imtiaz on Syed Shamsul Hasan posthumously in 2006.