By Nick Allen and Nadeem Sarwar, DPA
Rawalpindi (Pakistan) : Apart from legendary spectres and ghosts of former occupants who are said to still roam the narrow alleyways, there are no Hindus left in the bustling Bhabra Bazaar district of Rawalpindi.
As Pakistan prepares to mark 60 years of independence on Aug 14, this compact, teeming sub-community of some 100,000 Muslims descended from migrants from India is stirred by memories of the 1947 partition, when they supplanted the Hindu and Sikh families who lived in the central city.
Like many momentous upheavals in history, partition brought out the best and worst in people, says Abdul Razzaq, who came to Rawalpindi with his wife in 1947 from Uttar Pradesh in India.
“Some Muslim gangs used to go round here looking for Sikhs and Hindus and attack them, but many other Muslims helped these families to travel safely to India,” the sprightly 85-year-old recalls as he takes sweet milky tea with visitors at a street stall.
“Some even provided Hindu friends with the clothes and veils of their sisters and mothers so that they could disguise themselves as Muslim women.”
Razzaq and his wife were lucky. British Gurkha troops prevented marauding Sikhs from attacking their train while crossing the new border, sparing them the fate of hundreds of thousands of innocents from both sides who perished in ethnic violence at the time.
Arriving migrants, who like their descendants today became known – often contemptuously – as “mohajirs”, were allocated properties vacated by Hindus on the strength of documented claims of properties they left in India.
Inevitably, some crooks occupied desirable Hindu properties by submitting fake documents, while Muslims who had been rich in India could easily end up struggling for their daily bread after being similarly duped.
“Hindu families who lived here treated us nicely. They offered us their homes and everything in them before they migrated to India,” says Razzaq, who spent the past 60 years in Bhabra Bazaar and saw his family grow to include 20 children and grandchildren.
Behind him traders with handcarts, donkeys, motorcycles and three-wheeled rickshaws stream noisily through a labyrinth of streets that still bears the architectural legacy of past tenants.
The ornate wooden balconies and elegant stone-carved window frames of many houses are distinctively Hindu in origin. Meanwhile, almost all of the “new” occupants of the district share the same migrant roots.
The older generation remembers discrimination it experienced in its new homeland. The feeling of being an outsider has taken years to pass, says Haji Mohammed Yaqub, a 66-year-old resident who also migrated from Uttar Pradesh in 1947.
Only six at the time, his main memories of partition are of watching Hindu families moving out of their houses with all their possessions. He and his family then gradually grafted themselves onto their new surrounds.
“In the beginning there was more discrimination but it diminished over the years to a minimum,” says Yaqub. “At first there were not many marriages between Mohajirs and locals, but nowadays young people don’t mind about family, caste and clan.”
Razzaq’s 45-year-old son Sarwar Butt is not convinced: “My father migrated but I was born here and yet they still call me a Mohajir,” he says with an air of resentment.
Having witnessed his country’s birth throes and transition to a nuclear power, Razzaq does not believe founding father of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, would like what he would find in the country today.
“It was supposed to be a peaceful country where Muslims could live a prosperous life in accordance with their tenets but what we see is violence and intolerance,” Razzaq says, lamenting the growing sectarian divide between Pakistan’s majority Sunni and Shia Muslims.
And 60 years after arriving, he admits that he and many of his contemporaries never really adjusted to their adopted homeland.
“I know many old men who spent every minute of their life in Pakistan with the hope that one day they would go back to their native villages,” he says before disappearing into the crowd.