Introduction
‘Corruption’Footnote 1 in Pakistan today has become a metaphor which symbolizes the crisis of governance. It is, alongside weak infrastructure and security concerns, a major impediment to overseas investment. Within domestic politics, claims of corruption have been used by politicians to undermine their rivals, and by the military to justify coups. Indeed, while no direct definitions of what constitutes corruption have been made, it has entered the public discourse as a national ‘problem’ which needs to be addressed. Successive regimes have attempted to do this through processes of accountability which have themselves been far from transparent and appear to have been frequently directed at political opponents, rather than being even-handed. In recent years, perceptions of the pervasiveness of ‘corruption’ have been reinforced by the prevalence of international league tables, which have consistently ranked Pakistan as one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
This paper seeks primarily to uncover evidence from new source material of acts of corruption in the early post-independence period. It reflects in part on the emerging public discourse on ‘corruption’, but does not set out to analyse it, or to look in depth at its political purposes. A range of incidences of corruption are analysed from individual acts of misappropriation, from instances of political corruption and nepotism to instances of petty and more gross administrative corruption. It argues that the legacy of Partition forms a common backdrop to these varieties of corruption. This fact has been seldom acknowledged, especially in ‘nationalist’ historiography which depicts the immediate post-independence period as a ‘golden age’ of unity of purpose and common sacrifice to the task of nation-building. The paper not only interrogates the nationalist understanding of the post-partition decade, but also provides historical depth to the political science approach to corruption in contemporary Pakistan. It argues that understandings which do not appreciate the long established roots of corruption will fail to address its pervasiveness in both academic and policy terms. Finally the paper raises the question of whether it is possible to discern the rise of a new elite, comprising refugees, officials, local politicians and landowners, who had grown rich on the pickings of misappropriated evacuee property.
The new sources utilized in this paper provide material relating primarily to West Punjab. This Pakistan province was by no means unique. Wherever there was large scale migration, there were similar opportunities for corruption, as Sarah Ansari has revealed with respect to Sindh.Footnote 2 The focus here on Punjab is justified, however, not because in Jinnah's own words it was the ‘cornerstone of Pakistan’, but because the scale of the problem was greater arising from the abandonment of huge amounts of property by migrants to India in 1947. Considerable amounts of this property were misappropriated in acts of individual, petty, political and gross corruption, for instance, according to one official estimate, around two million acres of abandoned agricultural land were ‘unauthorizedly held’ at the exodus of Hindus and Sikhs, and by 1960 more than three billion rupees worth of moveable goods had been ‘unearthed’ from the ‘usurpers’.Footnote 3
There is now an established literature on Partition-related migration.Footnote 4 The epicentre of both violence and migration was the Punjab. The 1948 Census of the Pakistan Ministry of Refugees and Rehabiliation reported that an estimated 4.5 million Hindus and Sikhs had fled to India, and more than 5.5 million Muslims had moved to the Pakistan Punjab alone.Footnote 5 The mass displacements brought increased government responsibilities to pursue programmes of resettlement and rehabilitation for the incoming refugees. It also introduced fierce competition for the allotment of abandoned land, businesses and residential properties.
Although much has been written about the creation of Pakistan and the refugee crisis that faced it in the wake of Partition, the handling of the evacuee property is under-researched with a notable exception in Vazira Zamindar's recent work relating to Karachi and Delhi.Footnote 6 For a long time, standard nation-making accounts painted a relative ‘success story’ of Pakistan's response to the crisis brought about by Partition.Footnote 7 Recent research on its statecraft has gone some way towards reversing the popular impression of ‘received national wisdom’ by explaining the political and economic history of Pakistan's first crucial decade. It has linked the decisions and policies of this period with the emerging processes of centralization and the domination of the military and bureaucracy over political leadership.Footnote 8 More recently, the ‘new history’ approach sees Partition as a process, rather than as a unique event confined to 1947, and recent scholarship has extended the historical understanding of the impact on state construction of the mass refugee influx, and its legacies for ethnic and religious nationalism.Footnote 9
Recent scholarship has also brought out the highly differentiated refugee experiences of resettlement. It is becoming clear that the social and political capital of refugees impacted hugely on their rehabilitation prospects.Footnote 10 It is also evident that across the north of the subcontinent amongst the most important ‘everyday’ interactions between the post-colonial state and its new citizens were issues relating to refugee resettlement.Footnote 11 This paper argues that opportunities for various types of ‘corruption’ were central to these interactions. Without acknowledging this factor, it is impossible both to fully understand the state construction process and the differentiated refugee experience.
Corruption in its manifestation of nepotism did not emerge suddenly in the Pakistan regions of the subcontinent. In the Punjab, for example, it was rooted in the British colonial state's encouragement of a collaborative network which emphasized patron-client ties.Footnote 12 The control of commodities and rationing arising from the Second World War not only further encouraged new clientelist networks across the political spectrum, but also created opportunities for corruption. Indeed, part of the Muslim League's growing appeal in the Punjab was its claims that Hindu and Sikh officials were favouring their communities with respect to the distribution of rationed goods.Footnote 13 The war-time legacy of increased government intervention and opportunities for corruption was further buttressed by the post-war rapid political change that presented an environment of transitional state.Footnote 14 On the eve of Partition, the growing uncertainties generated an atmosphere in which a culture of political corruption further took root, especially as a result of the collapse of the Unionist coalition ministry of Khizr Hayat Khan Tiwana in Punjab and the opportunity to replace the Muslim League government.Footnote 15 In March 1947, a leading Punjab Muslim League leader—Nawab Iftikhar Hussain of Mamdot, later the first post-independence Chief Minister of West Punjab—allegedly offered an amount of Rs 100,000 to four ‘untouchable’ members of the Punjab Legislative Assembly to change their loyalty in order to strengthen his bid to replace the Unionists as the governing party.Footnote 16
Partition brought increased opportunities for corruption. These were seized by civil servants who extracted graft, politicians who illegally appropriated evacuee property, and members of local populations who enriched themselves at the expense of refugees. The latter were not merely victims in this process however, as some refugees sought to exploit the system by exaggerating their losses in order to receive excessive compensation. There were thus ‘winners’ from corruption drawn from all sections of society. The ‘losers’ were primarily refugees who were unable to get their rights to compensation recognized without interminable delays, or who were fleeced by locals for basic essentials. Some refugees fell victim to extortion at the hands of their fellows, or found that their bribes were merely pocketed by careless officials. Before examining these processes, it is necessary to take stock of the amounts and kinds of evacuee property which individuals were scrambling to control.
Evacuee property and practices of resettlement
Evacuee property fell into the categories of land, urban and rural dwellings, shops and their goods, factories and raw materials. Vehicles were also sought after, as was ownership of entertainment centres, such as cinema houses. In theory, all of the abandoned property was to be used by the state to ‘compensate’ refugees and enable them to be re-housed and to start up their business, or in the case of farmers to begin their harvests.Footnote 17 India claimed that the Hindu and Sikh refugees abandoned more than 6.6 million acres of agricultural land in West Punjab alone. Pakistan, on the other hand, claimed that the Muslim refugees left behind about 5.4 million acres of cultivable land in East Punjab.Footnote 18 The Indian government asserted that not only in terms of land, but with respect to other abandoned assets, Hindus and Sikhs left behind 38.1 billion rupees worth of resources, compared with the Muslim refugee evacuee property in India of just 3.8 billion, and demanded that the Pakistan state should make up the difference to India.Footnote 19 Pakistan disputed these figures and pointed out that not only had a large number of properties been destroyed in the violence leading up to Partition, but that the state had to deal with a surplus migration (in West Punjab of a million people).
The issue of evacuee property nonetheless remained a bone-of-contention between India and Pakistan. While Pakistan rejected the Indian claims, it is undeniable that Hindu and Sikh migrants from the West Punjab were far wealthier than were Muslim refugees from the Indian East Punjab. Although Hindus and Sikhs comprised just 25 per cent of the undivided Punjab's population, they owned almost 50 per cent of the agricultural land and more than two-thirds of the urban properties and industrial units.Footnote 20
Legally, evacuee property could not be allotted permanently until issues relating to it were addressed between India and Pakistan. On 29 August 1947, both countries established a mechanism by creating the office of the Custodians of Refugees Property to protect and preserve the properties of the displaced persons by appointing the custodians. To this effect, the Administration of Evacuee Property Act was issued on 23 September 1947 by the West Punjab government. This was followed by the West Punjab Protection of Evacuee Property Ordinance which defined ‘Evacuee Property’ as:
Any property in West Punjab which owing to the recent disturbances, the owner cannot personally occupy or supervise, or take delivery of from the place of deposit, or in the case of a corporation property which forms the assets of any business or undertaking which has ceased wholly or partially to operate owing to the said disturbances.Footnote 21
While the legal title to the resources remained to the original ‘evacuees’, the West Punjab government requisitioned them by a notification published in the Punjab Gazette of 23 December 1947. The authorities wanted to use evacuee property to house migrants who were being kept at the state's expense in refugee camps. They also did not want too long to lapse because they were aware that locals had ‘illegally’ occupied abandoned properties in many parts of the Punjab. Initially, refugees were given temporary allocation of evacuee property. With respect to land this was settled on a temporary basis of 12 acres per family. By the end of March 1948, about 4 million (90 per cent) agriculturalist refugees had been resettled in this way. By the next year, over 1.5 million refugees had somehow been resettled in the urban areas.Footnote 22
Permanent agricultural resettlement took much longer, as it was dependent initially on the exchange of revenue records between the Indian and West Punjab districts and then entailed the task of the evaluation of refugee claims. This involved not only processes of verification, but the need to determine the comparative values of the vacated properties. It was not until January 1949 that a conference of the representatives of India and Pakistan held in Karachi drew up plans for the exchange of land and other immovable properties records. The proprietary right of evacuees to transfer their properties by sale or any other way was recognized. Following the agreement, ‘Special Jamabandi’ (revenue records of agricultural land) were exchanged between the two halves of the Punjab.Footnote 23 Henceforth, the government had the ability to ‘eliminate the cases of those people, who left no land in India and in some cases were not even agricultural tenants, [but] had grabbed a share of land in the rush of allotments’.Footnote 24
As the system of settlement was established, refugee populations were invited to register their ‘claims’ by presenting proof which showed the actual value of the abandoned properties. Then a verified compensation ‘claim’ or ‘unit’ was sanctioned to those who had an equivalent property. An elaborate Central Record Office was set up in Lahore under the West Punjab refugee resettlement authorities for the verification of registered claims. Refugees in West Punjab could receive 4,836,000 of ‘standard acres’, as record of the land resettlement shows, against the ‘rural’ population of refugees of 4,325,000. In order to ensure an equitable distribution of the vacated land, a scale of ‘graded cuts’ was introduced fixing a maximum limit of allotment. A cut of 50 per cent was imposed on claims above 20,000 ‘produce index units’ (roughly equal to 250 acres of irrigated land in the ‘canal colony’ areas such as Lyallpur, Multan, Shahpur and Montgomery) and no allotment exceeded 36,000 units, which were roughly equal to 450 acres of irrigated land.Footnote 25
The exchange of land revenue records removed in theory the illegal appropriation of evacuee property, either by fraudulent refugees, or locals masquerading as refugees. Opportunities for corruption persisted, however, in terms of the implementation of this process, as discussed below. Moreover, it remained much more complex to verify the authenticity of claims to urban properties. Even with respect to rural evacuee property, a grey area existed after 1949 with respect to migrants from those parts of India outside Punjab who settled in the Pakistan Punjab. These refugees came from what were termed ‘non-agreed areas’ as revenue records had not been transferred from their ancestral homes. While refugees from the so-called ‘agreed areas’ of the Punjab were allotted land on a ‘provisional permanent basis’; in contrast the refugees from ‘non-agreed areas’ were allotted land only on a ‘temporary basis’.Footnote 26 Information on migrants’ holdings from these areas could not be officially verified and was dependent on their submission of affidavits signed or thumb-printed. Inevitably such claims were frequently exaggerated, and, at the same time, opened up possibilities for all kinds of forgeries. Even with respect to the ‘agreed areas’ there were openings for corruption and nepotism. The registering of claims and speedy settlement were not as straightforward as the exchange of land revenue records might imply. Before considering some of the problems refugees experienced in making their claims, as a result of administrative corruption, it is important to acknowledge the extent of the appropriation of evacuee property by local residents.
Illegal appropriation of evacuee property
It is clear from both documentary and oral sources that local residents, as well as officials and politicians attempted to enrich themselves or their relatives by occupying evacuee property. According to the Secretary of the Pakistan Ministry of Refugees and Rehabilitation, more than 50 per cent of the abandoned houses and 36 per cent of the shops were illegally occupied by the ‘locals’ at the time of mass displacements of Hindus and Sikhs to India.Footnote 27 A review of the First Five-Year Plan of the West Punjab government commented that ‘out of 2,900 unregistered abandoned factories in the Punjab, 135 were found to be in unauthorized possession’.Footnote 28 Similarly, there were reports that over 1.8 million acres of land, in West Punjab alone, were illegally occupied by ‘local residents’.Footnote 29
A number of reports by the Special Branch Secret Intelligence Police reveal that some local ‘influential persons’, ‘Muslim ring leaders’, as well as the ‘Town Salar [s]’, who were attached to the Muslim League National Guards, were occupying evacuee property in different places in West Punjab.Footnote 30 Pro-refugee newspapers too frequently reported that evacuee property had been grabbed by locals, who were thus preventing refugee families from rehabilitating themselves and earning their livelihood. The Pakistan Times on 29 November 1947, for example, carried a report on Mohammad Sharif Muttaqi, Managing Director of the Muslim India Insurance Company, who had illegally occupied four bungalows on Lahore's Mozang Road.Footnote 31 Similarly, the 13 April 1948 issue of the Lahore-based daily, Inquilab, carried a report of the Sub-Tehasidar of Sialkot, in which he was reported to be forcefully occupying evacuee land. This was clearly not an isolated case, as the matter had been raised earlier on 6 January 1948 on the floor of the West Punjab Assembly by Mian Mohammad Noor Ullah. During the course of a speech he declared that:
Many local zamindars have illegally occupied the Sikh properties . . . An influential zamindar in Lyallpur alone had illegally occupied 250 acres of agricultural land, which was abandoned by a Sikh Sardar last year . . . .Footnote 32
The unauthorized occupation of evacuee property was not limited to West Punjab, but was reported in localities across the subcontinent. According to one estimate, over 44,000 Muslim houses in the areas of old Delhi alone were illegally occupied in the period that straddled independence.Footnote 33 The scene in Sindh, however, presented a more complex situation where acute tensions between refugees and locals arose in the competition for resources. According to an official estimate, the influential local Sindhi landlords took possession of over 300,000 acres of evacuee agricultural land in collusion with the evacuee property officials.Footnote 34 Sarah Ansari has revealed that the issue of evacuee property generated strong feelings on the part of refugees in the province throughout the 1950s. She provides evidence of some ‘big zamindars’ grabbing evacuee land and strongly argues that such episodes not only prevented refugee families from rehabilitating themselves, but also greatly ‘contributed to the antagonism between refugees and non-refugees groups in the years since 1947’.Footnote 35 Disputes between locals and refugees were especially acute where abandoned evacuee resources were scarce and where there was no formalized scheme of compensation. East Bengal refugees were forced to ‘self-rehabilitate’ themselves by illegally squatting on private property in Calcutta.Footnote 36 In West Punjab, it was not just large landholders who took the opportunity to consolidate their power by acquiring evacuee properties, but much of the land was acquired by tenants. They faced hardship because of the migration of their former patrons, as indeed did service classes.Footnote 37 Unsurprisingly the incoming agriculturalist landholders faced stiff opposition from the former tenantry, not only when they attempted to take possession of their new allotments, but also in those instances when they refused to recognize the occupancy rights which tenants had been accorded by their former Sikh landlords. In some instances these were long standing arrangements that stretched back over many years, if not decades. Despite being allotted land, many refugee landlords in the rural West Punjab were ‘driven back to the towns or the camps from which they came . . . by the sitting tenants’.Footnote 38
Administrative corruption in the allotment processes
Recent work on Partition has sought to point out that most refugees experienced corruption and nepotism with respect to the allotment of evacuee property.Footnote 39 This has been especially examined with respect to urban property. To what extent corruption was systematic in the allotment processes is less clear. The police records used in this research reveal that in West Punjab there were networks of corruption arising from the allocation of evacuee property. Lower to higher officials ranging from the local Patwar Circle to the Central Record Room were involved in a variety of acts of bribery. False entries in property allotment records, faulty claims or multiple allotment orders could be obtained expeditiously through a payoff. A well-organized cadre of middlemen and functionaries was at work, including the so-called ‘secretariat touts’ and ‘pavement-sitting petition writers’, with claims of sufficient access and influence to the higher officials at Lahore, the headquarters of the settlement project. Many regularly commuted ‘like shuttle-coaches’ between the district headquarters and the central record office to obtain ‘favourable orders from the concerned officers for those who paid the toll’.Footnote 40
Local revenue staff, such as the patwaris and tahsildars, became the most important officials in this whole process. They had considerable ‘discretion’ when it came to allocating land or buildings which varied considerably in terms of value. The choicest pickings could be secured for a ‘consideration’. The patwaris and tahsildars were thus important components of the ‘Vicious Circle’ of an ‘unholy alliance’ of corruption as a local newspaper described it at the time, which also involved officials based at the district and provincial level. For many of them, the resettlement project was looked upon as a pool of resources to be exploited as effectively as possible. The proceeds of corruption naturally varied with the value of evacuee property. The rate of graft to obtain land in the fertile ‘congested areas’ [canal colonies] of the districts of Multan, Lyallpur, Shahpur and Montgomery was much higher than in other places. Within four months of the creation of the rehabilitation scheme, the extent of official corruption had reached such a sordid level that the issue was discussed at the West Punjab Assembly in the first week of January 1948. A member declared on the floor of the House that: ‘Tahsidars and other revenue officers are openly taking bribe from the refugees. In fact, they were meant to be the guardians of the evacuee property . . . in contrast they are misusing and occupying the evacuee property with both hands’.Footnote 41 Another member maintained that ‘revenue officials asked for Rs 100 bribe for one case’ and he called for drastic action against the corrupt officials, demanding the Speaker of House to set up ‘an official inquiry . . . to stop such irregularities and malpractices’.Footnote 42
The reports of corrupt officials ‘making-money’ from the refugees also appeared in the press. The Civil and Military Gazette on 13 December 1949 published a detailed report on the inquiry against Ibraiham Ahmad Usmani, the Deputy Director of Sialkot rehabilitation office. He had been suspended for issuing ‘large-scale bogus ration cards’. The 11 September 1951 issue of the same newspaper carried a report on the Dera Ghazi Khan district Rehabilitation Officer, who was reportedly arrested over accepting an ‘illegal gratification’ from a refugee from Amritsar for allocating him an evacuee shop. Officials not only took bribes however, they also acquired property for themselves and their relatives. A report of the Special Branch Intelligence Police revealed that Okara's Special Magistrate, Mian Abdul Haq, was ‘dishonestly squeezing valuable property at nominal prices to his friends and relatives’.Footnote 43
Although corruption in the distribution of evacuee property was pervasive throughout the towns and cities of Pakistan, the Central Record Office, in the Lahore Secretariat, was the epicentre. It was the site of refugees’ repeated anger, frustration, and disappointment. Refugees frequently protested outside over alleged corruption by officials. There was almost a riot, for example, on 1 July 1948, when an angry crowd of an estimated 5,000 refugees gathered on the Lower Mall road at the front of the Lahore Secretariat. Police used a lathi-charge to disperse the refugees who were shouting angrily against the West Punjab government.Footnote 44 In some places such as the district of Montgomery (present-day Sahiwal), refugees took out processions to raise their voices against the corruption of officials, in this instance the city magistrate. It was in Montgomery that a new organization was founded known as ‘Anjuman-e-Sada-e-Mazlooman’, with a view to raising refugee concerns against nepotism. In a resolution it urged the West Punjab government to stop nepotism in the allotment of evacuee property by appointing ‘pious’ officials.Footnote 45 The frustration of refugees was sometimes used by ‘radical’ groups to promote their brand of politics. For example, the Ahrars repeatedly accused the West Punjab government of Nawab Mamdot and his ministers of ‘jobbery, nepotism and holding them responsible for corruption and black-marketing’.Footnote 46
From the outset, the refugee issue was politicized as their spokesmen, rival politicians to the Muslim League as well as pro-refugee newspapers criticized the government's handling of the refugee issue. Refugee spokesmen demanded that illegally acquired property be recovered so that the migrants could be fully compensated. While it served some political interests to champion the refugee cause, the political elite were even more involved in corruption than were the officials.
Political corruption and the discourse of ‘corruption’ in West Punjab
The worst abuses involved a number of leaders of the Punjab Muslim League who attempted to lay their hands on evacuee property. Records from the Ministry of Refugee and Rehabilitation reveal that it was not just high ranking leaders but also those at the grassroots level who attempted to enrich themselves and their relatives by occupying evacuee property, or by illegally allotting it. With respect to the districts, one official report recorded:
The abandoned evacuee property offered a temptation to which many of the leading figures in the districts succumbed, and political considerations prevented suitable action being taken in such cases. In allocating houses and especially factories it was found to be very difficult.Footnote 47
However, the most notorious cases of corruption involved high ranking Muslim League politicians. It is from these episodes that the beginnings of a ‘corruption’ discourse in Pakistan can be discerned. Ultimately this discourse was to be highly detrimental not only to individuals who were to be ‘disqualified’ from politics, but also for the whole democratic process itself. Charges of corruption circulated against the first two Chief Ministers of the West Punjab—Nawab Mamdot and Mumtaz Daultana. While the charges do not appear to be fabricated, they were convenient not only for local rivals, but for those in the national government who were concerned by ‘provincialist’ outlooks. This was not of course unique to West Punjab, but was even more pronounced in Sindh, although in both instances Centre-province tensions revolved around the refugee ‘problem’. Mumtaz Daultana was accused of being ‘nepotistic’. He apparently allotted the ‘biggest flour mill of the subcontinent’ to his brother-in-law in Sargodha district, besides allotting a prized evacuee shop on the Mall Road and the Odeon Cinema, in Lahore.Footnote 48 During his period as Chief Minister from August 1947 to January 1949 Nawab Mamdot had acquired an ‘unenviable reputation for corruption involving the allotment of refugee property’.Footnote 49 The charges against Mamdot included the misuse of public office to personally acquire hundreds of acres of prime agricultural land at nominal rates in the district of Montgomery. He was also alleged to have awarded land to his followers and former tenants in order to keep his vote-bank intact. Mamdot was the focus of severe press criticism at the time for his handling of the refugee question. The Pakistan Times, owned by Mian Iftikharuddin, then the Central Minister for Rehabilitation of Refugees, was at the forefront of exposing corruption scandals against the Nawab.Footnote 50
Dealing with the refugee crisis greatly strained relations between the Centre and the provinces in the early years of Pakistan's history.Footnote 51 Mian Iftikharuddin severely criticized the West Punjab government's handling of the refugee issue and used his newspaper to expose political corruption in the province. He came out with a radical solution for rehabilitating the refugees, when he proposed breaking up the large estates in the Punjab, with a view to distributing land amongst the refugees. He recommended that ‘a graded tax’ should be levied on the income of all landlords, drawing more than Rs 15,000 per annum from their agricultural land. This revolutionary proposal was, not surprisingly, turned down by the provincial cabinet which was dominated by the landed gentry, headed by Nawab Mamdot, one of the biggest landlords of the undivided Punjab. In turn, Mamdot criticized the central government's ‘arbitrary decisions and interferences in the internal administration of the Province’. He targeted the Refugees Minister who had failed to obtain for East Punjab Muslims the same treatment regarding property as had been received by the West Punjab Hindu and Sikh refugees.Footnote 52 Mian Iftikharuddin tendered his resignation on the grounds that the government was unwilling to take speedy measures to rehabilitate the refugees. Mamdot was not only embroiled in factional rivalries with other politicians, but also clashed with the Pakistan-Punjab Refugee Council, a liaison body between the Centre and the province, over the right of the allotment of abandoned motor cars and vehicles. Even within the Mamdot cabinet, there were some unpleasant scenes; at one stage the Revenue and Industry Ministers were at loggerheads over the allotment of abandoned factories.Footnote 53
The Centre was frequently finding the provincial leadership an unruly team. It was both convenient and easy for it to encourage the view that ‘corruption’ had retarded smooth refugee settlement in the province. One immediate response of the Centre was the appointment of the Special Centre Police for ‘wiping out corruption’ in the Punjab.Footnote 54 These investigations proceeded to a background of infighting in the Punjab Muslim League leadership. On 25 April, Jinnah intervened and summoned the Punjabi leaders in Karachi to resolve the growing fissures. But the efforts proved futile. Even greater problems concerning the refugee situation had surfaced in Sindh where its Chief Minister refused to countenance the taking of further refugees when the Punjab's camps were closed. Realising the gravity of the difficulties, Jinnah announced that ‘a grave emergency has arisen’ and that ‘the economic life of Pakistan is threatened by circumstances arising out of a mass movement of population from and into Pakistan, a State of Emergency is hereby declared’.Footnote 55 The Khuhro ministry in Sindh was dismissed on 26 April 1948. The political legacy of this decision impacted greatly on the evolution of democratic process in Pakistan and indeed rendered a precedent for overriding provincial politicians in the early months of Pakistan's history.
Jinnah's death in September 1948, however, dealt a blow to the moves towards centralization. Punjab politics continued to be dominated by the personal rivalries between Daultana, who was increasingly seen as the Centre's man, and Nawab Mamdot, the Chief Minister. In January 1949, the Governor-General of Pakistan, Khwaja Nazimuddin, dissolved the Punjab administration in a strongly worded statement that ‘public life had been demoralized by corruption and discipline in the services destroyed by intrigue’.Footnote 56 The dismissal of Mamdot's ministry, Ayesha Jalal has argued, ‘was a blatant indication that the Centre, dominated by the Urdu-speaking refugee politicians, considered the Punjabi representatives to be untrue, corrupt and non-cooperative’.Footnote 57 A trial of strength between the central cabinet and the Mamdot faction was in prospect, and an inquiry of ‘serious charges of misappropriation of public funds’ was initiated against Mamdot in the Lahore High Court, of which he was subsequently found ‘guilty’ in 1950.
Attacks on politicians for corruption were not just based on ‘fact’ but also on the state's discourse of corruption specifically directed against opponents, especially those like Nawab Mamdot in Punjab and Muhammad Ayub Khuhro in Sindh who were regarded as too ‘provincialist’ in outlook. In a recent study on Pakistan, Farzana Shaikh comments on what may be termed the moral economy of corruption and shows how the anti-democratic corruption dominated discourse emerged early in Pakistan. This was selective in its targets and was politicized, as are later accountability discourses.Footnote 58 Corruption scandals against the provincial leaders were not exclusively Centre-directed, however, but were also exposed by provincial rivals. The general extent of corruption meant that leaders to whom they were attached would have found it difficult to deny them, even in the unlikely circumstances of being impeccably honest. Most dangerously of all, the whole political elite were increasingly seen as ‘dishonest’. Such comments as those made by one parliamentarian below unwittingly strengthened the encroaching power of the military and the bureaucracy. Mohammad Afzal Cheema astoundingly declared on the floor of the House on 10 March 1954:
A new chapter of irregularities has opened up in the dealing with urban evacuee property and in the allotment of refugee rehabilitation . . . . These misappropriations could not be stopped despite every effort of the Government. Many honourable members of this assembly are responsible for misusing the evacuee property . . . [There were] many who immediately after partition occupied the big houses and bungalows [of departing Hindus and Sikhs] . . . Mr. Speaker . . . Without disclosing the name of any honourable member of this assembly, I can inform this House with full reliability and trust that many seasoned members of this assembly have adopted urban life because of the illegal occupation of [the vacated] houses . . . . They did not need to adopt urban life as they used to live a rural life before partition . . . . They made the occupancies considering them as rewards for their services for the creation of Pakistan . . . .Footnote 59
This was one of the reasons that not only ‘deprived the refugees from their rights . . . ’, Cheema continued, ‘but also created difficulties in the handling of resettlement matter’. He then went on to declare that political exigencies obstructed accountability and led to the protection of powerful unscrupulous politicians. ‘Our Government regularized their occupancies because of its political exigencies. I understand that there are still hundreds of houses and bungalows that could be traced out from the people who had illegally occupied them’. Cheema concluded his speech by demanding that the Speaker investigate the misappropriation in the handling of evacuee property.
Cheema was not alone in exposing the political corruption surrounding the evacuee property. There were other members in the Assembly who were highly critical of the Punjab Muslim League's handling of the refugee settlement and exposed their rivals’ corruption. C. E. Gibbon, a Christian member of the Punjab Assembly, was especially outspoken in his criticism. Pointing towards the ruling Punjab Muslim League leaders, during a debate in March 1954, Gibbon alleged that when the refugees needed help they were ‘thinking of all the evacuee property, they could lay their hands on’. He claimed how some politicians were ‘playing double game’ and used the refugee settlement as ‘a pawn in their political game’.
Every refugee means a vote for the Muslim League. If the poor refugee says, I am not prepared to vote for you, then up comes the Rehabilitation Inspector with a big notice that under rule so and so, please vacate your house within 7 days . . . . There are the very people who are playing [a] double game from start to finish . . . to keep the poor refugees hanging at the end of a string so that [the] Muslim League may remain in power; so that they can use their votes by giving them [a] bogus allotment and so on . . . . Footnote 60
Gibbon further declared that some leaders of the Punjab Muslim League not only deliberately delayed refugee settlement and cultivated forced settlement, but also they knowingly sanctioned the bogus allotments of their followers, mainly in order to build their electoral constituencies. In his long assembly speech, Gibbon then exposed the growing tensions between the Centre and the province concerning the issue of refugee settlement. Directly targeting the Punjab Refugee Ministry, Gibbon bluntly declared that, ‘You try to transfer your responsibility to the Centre and the Centre transfers the responsibility to you and you go on, hoodwinking the people from start to finish’.Footnote 61 Thousands of refugees in the Punjab shared these heartfelt sentiments, they were not however conducive to establishing a consolidated and legitimate democratic regime, in Punjab or elsewhere in Pakistan.
Refugee corruption
Refugees were not however merely ‘victims’ of venal officials and corrupt politicians. Little, if anything, has been written about their illegal occupying of abandoned properties, or their misuse of the allotment process. Standard historical accounts in Pakistan present the refugees as having personally sacrificed so that a Muslim homeland could be created. The extent to which they may have illegally profited from migration is hidden. Police First Information Reports, court proceedings and records from the Pakistan Ministry of Refugees and Rehabilitation, however, reveal that some refugees not only illegally seized evacuee property, but also sought to exploit the allotment schemes to gain excessive compensation for their property which they had abandoned in India. The district authorities in Lyallpur expressed concern that refugees from the districts of Amritsar and Gurdaspur looted and illegally occupied the houses and shops of departing Hindus and Sikhs.Footnote 62 In the city of Sheikhupura, some refugee families from Jullundur, immediately upon their arrival, occupied abandoned houses. In one case, this resulted in a later clash with the revenue staff, when a family was ordered to vacate a house in the city's Ramgarh mohalla, because it could not provide a ‘legal’ claim for compensation.Footnote 63
Clearly, a number of refugees immediately upon their arrival either simply occupied available abandoned properties or secured more than their compensation ‘claim’. There were many who obtained the ‘hasty allotments’, regardless of the resources that they had left behind in India. While such practices enabled a great number of refugees to disperse from the camps, many ‘rightful claimants’ were deprived of their entitlement to housing. In the middle of 1949, the West Punjab government started the ‘second phase of urban rehabilitation work on scientific lines’ and directed the urban settlement officers in the different districts to deal with abuses of resettlement entitlement ‘for the benefit of more deserving refugees’. It aimed to confirm permanent allotment only to ‘the existing allottees if their occupancies had not been vitiated by fraud, malpractice or unjustified multiple allotments’.Footnote 64 By late that year, a survey of the Ministry of Refugees and Rehabilitation discovered over 12,400 houses and 12,000 shops, in the urban areas of West Punjab alone, to be in the ‘illegal occupation of undeserved people’.Footnote 65
The worst abuses involved the ‘Land Settlement Scheme’. As the record of the West Punjab land settlement scheme reveals, a great number of refugees misused the system to enrich themselves by registering ‘inflated’, ‘bogus’, ‘double’ or ‘multiple’ claims. The report records that:
A number of cases were brought to the notice of the authorities where displaced persons put forward bogus claims as they either did not possess any land in East Punjab or very little as compared to their claims . . . [There were numerous claimants who] were not genuine evacuees at all . . . [and they submitted] false affidavit[s] to prove their claims.Footnote 66
While the reports of abusing the allotment process were observed in all the sections of refugee populations, the tendency to submit false or exaggerated claims was particularly striking in the case of refugees who belonged to the ‘non-agreed areas’, where records could not be obtained from India. The Secretary of the Settlement Department, Rana Abdul Hamid, explained to me during the course of interview ‘Refugees from [the Indian] Punjab also filed false claims, the majority of refugees from out of the Punjab, however, mainly misused the system and gained multiple properties on their sole claim’.Footnote 67 There was no authentic mechanism to verify or cross-reference the affidavits which were the sole documentary record for refugee claims from the ‘non-agreed areas’. Bogus claims could be made and they were usually undetected if officials were ‘onside’. Evidence for this practice can be found scattered in the historical record of legal judgements. One instance involved the ‘bogus’ case of Bagh Ali, who secured ‘double allotment against a sole claim form’ in Hafizabad tahsil. Subsequently ‘the allotment on the name of Bagh Ali was found a fake . . . and no such person ever appeared before the Settlement Commissioner, (Rural)’.Footnote 68
In the main, richer and resourceful refugee groups sought to exploit the system. Their money and personal connections with the officials and politicians were assets employed in not only grabbing the best pickings but also in securing a great deal more than their share. Moreover, they were politically well-versed in the way the system functioned, which put them in an advantageous position for gaining access to the most enviable vacated resources. As Ravinder Kaur has shown, the richer refugees knew how to ‘break the codes that the state had invented’ to extract maximum state benefits.Footnote 69 With respect to West Bengal in this period, Joya Chatterji has shown that ‘the spoils of partition’ were distributed among sections of the state elite and upwardly mobile castes and commercial groups, which changed the balance of power and wealth within that society.Footnote 70 The chief refugee ‘gainers’ from the scheme of redistribution of evacuee property in Pakistan were urban migrants who took over the industries and businesses vacated by Hindus and Sikhs, many of which had grown considerably in areas of West Punjab and Karachi during the Second World War. These migrants were largely drawn from Gujarati-speaking Khoja and Memon refugee communities from Kathiawar and Bombay. Other important refugee families included the Ispahanis and Adamjees from Calcutta and the Saigols and Arains from the Punjab. This group were to later form the nucleus of the notorious ‘Twenty-two Families’ that dominated Pakistan's economy in the Ayub era when they were estimated to control around two-thirds of all industrial capital of Pakistan.Footnote 71 These influential groups had strong and mutually beneficial connections with the migrant-dominated political elite and bureaucracy. In actuality, the political and administrative machinery handling the rehabilitation project was itself primarily dominated by the members of migrant community who ‘were sensitive to refugee needs, though chiefly to those of urban settlers’.Footnote 72 Their control in the administrative apparatus could be ascertained by the fact that despite being only 10 per cent of the total population they held over 34 per cent of the positions of central services of Pakistan in the early 1960s.Footnote 73
Refugees’ reliance on personal networking, based on kinships, ethnic background and previously-shared localities, created ‘a culture of corruption in terms of grabbing jobs and property . . . ’, as Mohammad Waseem has emphasized, ‘the obvious casualty was public morality, rule of law, administrative efficiency and official credibility’.Footnote 74 It is now established that there were close ties between influential bureaucrats and politicians such as Ghulam Muhammad, Governor-General of Pakistan (1951–1955), and Chaudhry Muhammad Ali, Prime Minister of Pakistan (1955–1956) and leading refugee capitalists. Undoubtedly such migrant politicians and bureaucrats-turned-politicians needed to reward clients and kinfolk as they had no political base in Pakistan and wanted to keep their vote-banks intact. They actively tried to cultivate refugees as their new supporters by lavishly rewarding them resources out of evacuee property. As we have seen earlier, a fine example of this is provided by the first post-independence Chief Minister of West Punjab, Nawab Mamdot.
The bulk of the refugees did not of course have high level political access to smooth their way. They experienced petty corruption in their ‘everyday’ dealings with the state. In order to make even small steps in getting their cases heard, they had to oil the wheels of the corruption machinery with bribes to low-level officials. Their ‘considerations’ often failed to secure their cases. The result was that their experiences and those of kinsfolk provided the basis for a grass-roots ‘corruption’ discourse which, as we have seen, found its way into the papers and ultimately the debates in the legislative assemblies. While petty corruption did not possess the economic and political impact of large scale administrative and political corruption, it contributed to an atmosphere where fraudulent activities were taken for granted and in which charges against public figures were given immediate credence. A correspondent outlined the refugees’ frustration at petty corruption in the Pakistan Times in 1954: ‘For many poor and aggrieved refugees, it was almost impossible to file their claims without offering bribes to the officials or their touts’.Footnote 75 This situation was so endemic that it continued until well after a decade of independence. In March 1958 for example, Chaudhry Mahtab Khan, a Lahore based member of the Punjab Assembly, was still declaring that:
[The] Refugee settlement scheme is full of corruption. You would hardly find any Muhajir who has not been forced to pay-off bribe between Rs 100 and Rs 1000. Every day bribe is being given by poor Muhajirs to Patwaris, Sub-Tahsidars [revenue officers] and other high rank officers.Footnote 76
Ultimately the discourse on ‘corruption’ was to provide justification for Ayub's seizure of power. In the years before this the civilian governments had attempted with varying degrees of success to address the issue of misappropriation of evacuee properties. Significantly it was easier to retrieve looted goods that had been seized during the partition-related violence, than it was to curb political nepotism, or break the rings of administrative corruption.
Efforts for the recoveries and anti-corruption drives
There is evidence of a number of police drives to recover looted goods. These formed part of the initial attempt to restore some semblance of law and order, after months of violence and crime in the Punjab region. Less than a month after independence, police arrested five ‘ring leaders’ from the districts of Kamalia and Gojra, Lyallpur and recovered stolen properties worth over Rs 200,000.Footnote 77 In the weeks which followed, police recovered the following amounts of property: in Sialkot this amounted to over 170,000; in Lahore, Rs 200,000; and in Montgomery Rs 27,000. In Gujranwala and Dera Ghazi Khan over Rs 100,000 worth of property was recovered. Besides the looted property worth Rs 950,000, over 900 cattle were also recovered from Kasur.Footnote 78
Even these limited successes frequently encountered local resistance. One recorded, and perhaps not an atypical episode, involved a clash between the residents of the Mughal Pura locality of the city of Lahore and the local police over the recovery of abandoned Hindu cars. A Sub-Inspector reported the events to the local thana:
They held Hindus’ cars illegally and thought now they belonged to them. They claimed that Hindus left the cars for them in their mohalla and would not hand them over to the department at any cost. They were ready to fight . . . . Some clashed with the police and threatened. I got an injury in my forehead.Footnote 79
Recognizing the scale of the problem, some collective efforts were made by the governments of both India and Pakistan to ‘unearth’ stolen goods and property. On 8 December 1953, a conference of the representatives of both countries was held in Karachi to consider the outstanding problems connected to the moveable evacuee property. The two-day meeting resulted in an agreement which was called the ‘Moveable Property Agreement 1953’. According to the arrangement, initially the period of recovery ran for four years: from 31 December 1953 to 31 December 1957. Other measures included the establishment of the Evacuee Property Recovery Department and the appointment of Recovery Officers with special discretionary powers similar to those of magistrates. Immediately after the agreement, a recovery drive was launched, By the middle of 1958, the Pakistan authorities had claimed to have unearthed about Rs 70.1 million worth of goods alone, belonging to more than 1,400 Hindu and Sikh ‘evacuees’ in different parts of the country.Footnote 80
The recovery of looted goods was one matter; however, dealing with the litany of false claims, illegal occupations and exactions arising from evacuee properties and allotments was altogether another matter. Corruption, as we have seen, was endemic and varied from petty bribes to large scale scandals. The legislation designed to tackle these problems, namely the 1947 Prevention of Corruption Act, was meant to be enforced through the creation of a Special Anti-Corruption Police Establishment. This was grist to the mill of the emerging ‘corruption’ discourse but in reality tackled only the tip of the iceberg of the actual cases. Periodically, the Government issued strict warnings to refugees who had obtained allotments on the basis of ‘bogus claims’. On 2 January 1955, for example, the West Punjab government circulated a press note stating that 1 June of that year was the deadline by which to surrender voluntarily the ‘illegal transactions’ and warned that failing to do so would be dealt with by ‘strict rules’.Footnote 81 In reality, such warnings and deadlines were rarely observed or implemented. The beneficiaries kept hold of the property they had occupied, mainly by bribing, or influencing the officials charged with handling the allotments.
There were some prosecutions under the Prevention of Corruption Act 1947. By October 1953, over 5,000 cases were registered, though only a fraction actually resulted in conviction or any departmental punishment.Footnote 82 There was thus little disincentive to discontinue corrupt practices. In 1955, an assessment found that ‘no other symptom of Pakistan public life has contributed more to the demoralization of the common man than corruption’.Footnote 83 One the eve of the 1958 coup, M. A. Qizilbash, Chief Minister of West Punjab, declared in a session of the provincial assembly that amongst the political elite ‘now from top to bottom, there was hardly a person who was not corrupt’.Footnote 84 In part, the discourse on ‘corruption’ provided the bases for the 1958 first military takeover in Pakistan. ‘The habitual practice of bribery and dishonesty tends to pave the way for an authoritarian regime’, as Myrdal has observed, ‘whose disclosures of corrupt offenders provide a basis for its initial acceptance by the articulate strata of the population’.Footnote 85 Undoubtedly, Ayub Khan used the ‘corruption’ discourse to justify his rule, and the majority of the refugee populations accepted this intervention gladly. He highlighted the need for a new broom by appointing General Muhammad Azam Khan to the post of Minister of Refugee Rehabilitation. A rapid survey of the displaced persons in 1958 found that there were still around 146,700 families in 35 cities and towns requiring housing facilities in one shape or another.Footnote 86 Although the regime was charged with building different housing schemes for these refugees, first it considered it essential to eliminate bogus claims and recover illegally occupied property. For this purpose the last day of 1958 was fixed as the deadline for declaration and surrender of ‘unauthorisedly held evacuee property’. The announcement was widely advertised, warning the ‘usurpers’ of the severe penalties for failure to do so. Other measures taken by the military regime included the establishment of an Evacuee Property Intelligence Bureau and Directorate of Enforcement Staff.
For the first time the warnings and deadlines yielded encouraging results for the recovery of occupied properties. Eleven days before the deadline around 3,000 people had already withdrawn their claims, and a further 3,300 had asked to be permitted to reduce them.Footnote 87 As the deadline expired, the Evacuee Property Intelligence Bureau launched a massive country-wide recovery operation to unearth ‘hidden evacuee property’. Within six months of the operation, the authorities had retrieved over Rs 20 million worth of illegally held land, houses, shops and industrial units in different parts of the country. A further Rs 70 million worth of urban evacuee property was recovered, besides the agricultural land.Footnote 88 Wealthy migrants were particularly targeted as, for example, the powerful entrepreneurial Saigol family of Lyallpur, in the Punjab. By late 1960, the military regime's Enforcement Staff had recovered over Rs 90 million worth of illegally held properties.Footnote 89
Apart from the utilization of recoveries for the disposal of genuine claims, the military regime set aside an amount of Rs 153 million for the construction of refugee accommodation in different parts of the country. In addition to cheap housing schemes of ‘one and two-roomed nucleus houses’, by the late 1960s, the regime had built 36 ‘satellite towns’ in different cities of the country. The decade-old difficulties of a number of unprivileged refugees were solved, and they were also given ‘permanent rights of the allotted property’. This did not mean the issue of refugee rehabilitation was ended. Many people were still involved in court battles with relatives over disputes, or were attempting to seek redress from the Settlement Department, Evacuee Trust Property Board, or the Auqaf Department. Such prolonged scuffling offered further opportunities for officials to manipulate the situation and extract money from the disputing parties. In many ways, the Ayub era is popularly remembered for solving the refugee problem. Yet, the whole decade of the 1960s witnessed a new surge in corruption in the industrial and trade licensing and patronage schemes such as bonus vouchers and route permits.
Conclusion
This paper has revealed that, despite nation-building mythology, the early post-independence period in Pakistan was marked by disharmony, rather than by unity and that this focused around the scramble for resources left behind by the departing Hindus and Sikhs. The conflict was especially corrosive with regard to democratic consolidation in the Punjab heartland of the country. The competition for resources encouraged the emergence of a ‘corruption discourse’ which was to justify later military intervention. Claims that political opponents were corrupt became a tactic in local power struggles and were useful for those at the Centre who wanted closer control over the provincial leaderships. This is not to claim that such corruption charges were ‘constructed’. There is clear evidence that politicians tried to rebuild their constituencies by siphoning off the resources for their followers and supporters out of the evacuee property. We have seen that these high profile cases existed in an environment of almost endemic administrative corruption. This included petty bribes at the lower levels to the appropriation of evacuee property at the higher levels. Refugees were not however mere victims of this situation. Those with the right connections profited handsomely from the general dislocation and worked cooperatively with both politicians and bureaucrats. In contrast, poorer refugees experienced long term difficulties in getting their compensation claims addressed.
The competition for resources and temptations of evacuee property was not only detrimental to genuine refugee claims and generated conflict between refugees and locals, but also exposed the fissures between the Centre and the provinces. It also distorted the Muslim League's ideological basis of unity, discipline and faith. Although the nation-making narratives painted a ‘golden age’ scenario of the early independence era in order to bolster the achievement of freedom, a 2005 survey of the Punjab Anti-Corruption Establishment significantly linked the problem of contemporary corruption with Pakistan's post-independence historical inheritance.
The post independence settlement of refugees and allotment of properties was the root of corruption in Pakistan. By the time of independence, an increase in corruption by senior public officials became much noticeable . . . . In Pakistan, white collar crime started in the 1950s, from settlement of claims of refugees to industrial sanctions and allotment of agriculture land . . . . All these were used as mechanics of moneymaking, giving rise to rampant corruption.Footnote 90
