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Migration was Inevitable!

For the Muslims of India, mass migration to Pakistan, lock, stock, and barrel, was not a choice between the lesser of two evils; it was rather a deliberate decision taken in the name of Allah and out of the love for Islam.

By Dr. Pirzada Sharf-e-Alam | March 2023

casting a thorough glance through the annals of history, particularly of the sub-continent, one cannot help oneself looking at a local community in India, comprising both Hindu and Muslim populations, who tend to happily live together with peace, interfaith fraternity, and communal harmony, enjoying absolute freedom to practice their religions or belief system. The scene, characterized by civil solidarity, peaceful coexistence as well as a deep-seated feeling of togetherness, was a ubiquitous site across India, particularly during the 600 years of Muslim rule in a predominantly Hindu-dominated land.

Flipping the page of history, one’s eyes now stumble upon a cantonment site of Meerut, abounding with troops of allegiant, loyal soldiers hailing from the Indian soil. In so doing, the soldiers set an example by refusing to tear open the greased cartridges of their rifles with their teeth, thus launching a mutiny against the British Army for the first time in the history of British India. Challenging the writ of British invaders, the brave Indian soldiers, consisting of both Muslim and Hindu believers, set the motion together for India’s independence. The next page from the history of India brings one to a somewhat blurry image of Maulvi Fazal-e-Haq, blown from a gun as a punishment for being a part of the independence movement.

In the wake of the 1857 War of Independence, the British Empire had decided to break up the unity of Hindu and Muslim communities and the best way to sow the seeds of hatred and loathing among them was to favour the Hindu lot over the Muslims as part of state policy. The divide et impera strategy worked well for the British rulers and the increasing hatred between Muslims and Hindus, slowly but surely, turned into an impregnable wall.

The formation of the Muslim League, the passing of the Lucknow Pact, the ensuing massacre at Jalianwala Bagh some years later, and the peak days of the Khilafat Movement. One keeps turning over the history pages and finds in every next chapter a manifestation of a new reality that keeps popping up unless it is perceived and evoked with all its brutality and ferocity as unleashed by British colonialism. How can one evade such historical watersheds as the Allahabad Address by Dr. Muhammad Iqbal in 1930, the passing of the Lahore Resolution in March 1940, the rise of Subhas Chandra Bose as the most popular leader of the Indian freedom struggle in 1942, and a prolonged but epoch-making negotiation over the partition of India by the top leadership of the Indian National Congress Party and the All-India Muslim League?

Though it is easy to figure out the Partition of India as a destined route to independence, it necessitates a great amount of deliberation and reflection to determine the inevitability of Indian Muslim migration to Pakistan, a newly-independent nation-state. In his poetry book titled ‘Faryad-e-Baba’, my father Pirzada Ashique Keranvi dwells on the chief reason behind the blood-ridden mass exodus of Indian Muslims to Pakistan. While describing the lachrymose tale of his long, blood-stained journey all alone towards a newly-born Muslim state, he often used to reiterate the words of strange rioters, mainly Sikhs and Hindus. They said, “Who the hell told you to carve out Pakistan?” The grisly stories of those who went through the bloody migration during the Partition are legion, scattered all over the place – be it a semicircular niche in the wall of a mosque in Lahore or a temple’s capstone in Varanasi much like the North Star, a cluster of streets of old Delhi or a multi-angled roundabout of Peshawar circled in all directions, green fields laden with ripe summer fruits or extended rail tracks with no end in sight, a busy market thronged by people shopping for Diwali and Eid-ul-Fitr, or be it a lush-green garden or the stoned walls of multistory houses of both Hindus and Muslims wailing across the Pakistan-India border. Each nook and cranny of this part of the world is soaked with the blood of those who left their centuries-old abode in quest of a new resting place.

Among the several interviews I conducted for the 1947 Partition Archive, an oral history organization in Berkeley, California, I can never fail to mention the gory tale of Syed Qasim. A resident of Solapur city of the Indian state of Maharashtra, Qasim, who was merely 7 years old at the time of migration, had to flee his home barefoot in the middle of the night, along with his entire family and community members, with little time to gather anything. Having wandered to and fro for a prolonged period of three months in a row, however, when they came back to Sholapur, they found that all their possessions were stolen and houses encroached. Back to square one, Qasim’s family exerted all its efforts to restart their lives from scratch in Sholapur as truly Indian citizens but all went in vain. In 1952, they once again decided to migrate to Pakistan, as there was no other choice left for the Muslims, come hell or high water!


Chowdhury Muhammad Saee, a resident of Jhelum in Punjab, was merely a 3-year-old kid at the time of Partition. Though he has not experienced the pain of a bloody migration in the flesh, he has heard scores of migration accounts from his elders who corroborate the inevitability of making Pakistan the homeland for good. According to Saee, one of the trains bound to Pakistan was looted by the local people at the Chalisa Junction Railway Station in Jhelum, while another gang of raiders broke into locked houses and took away the remaining items from there. Those houses mainly belonged to Hindus and Sikhs who had migrated to India after leaving their homes at the mercy of local people.

“The Partition of India was an unfortunate as well as disastrous experience for most of the people and the ensuing separation between Hindus and Muslims...”

Hakim Shahab Uddin is another living example. He along with his elder brother’s wife and some family members left his hometown in the Rohtak city of Haryana. Being on the mountaintop with some difficult days ahead, Shahab Uddin and the rest embarked on a long journey to the Promised Land via Delhi in dire straits and had to spend some rough couple of days in makeshift camps set up in Old Delhi. Their eventual journey was even more worrying as they had nothing to eat or drink while the rumour was in the air that all the water wells along the route had deliberately been contaminated with a deadly poison. Surviving the most dreaded journey of a thousand miles without food and water, when they reached Qadirabad, Pakistan via Lahore, they all were suffering from acute fever. However, a caring family in Qadirabad provided them with food, shelter, and everything they needed to survive for about a month.

Hamza Faruqui is Pakistan’s renowned critic and expert in Iqbaliat, a distinct field of study about the life and work of the Poet of the East, Dr. Allama Muhammad Iqbal. To escape the genocide of Muslims going on unabated in Patiala, a city in southeastern Punjab in India, Faruqui, a 3 to 4-year-old toddler, fled to Lahore along with his entire family nolens volens, leaving behind their well-settled business and ancestors’ houses permanently. His uncle and many other family members were brutally killed in the planned carnage. Having spent over 3 months in a refugee camp in quite a miserable condition, they were finally able to leave the camp when the law and order situation came to some normalcy in the terror-ridden area.

Based in Khairpur, Sindh, Mukhiya is another eyewitness to the migration and hardship associated with it. Mukhiya was asked by a local landlord in Khairpur to pay him a hefty sum of money as a ransom since Mukhiya wanted to stay in Pakistan after the Partition. In prevailing conditions, he moved to India with his whole family and community and they led the life of a prisoner in a refugee camp in India for over three months since they were not allowed to go outside their shabby camps. However, when the disease outbreak hit the camp inhabitants, they decided to move back to their homes in Khairpur, Sindh, the keys of which were in the keeping of a Muslim. Surprisingly, their homes were intact and nothing was stolen or missing from there.

Briefly put, it is more of a Herculean task here to briefly refer to all interviews carried out by this scribe for the 1947 Partition Archive. However, Mr. Tasneem Ahmed Siddiqui, who migrated from Uttar Pradesh to Sukkur in 1947, shares an eye-opening account that may help us analyse the underlying factors that led to the mass migration of Indian Muslims. He says, “The Partition of India was an unfortunate as well as disastrous experience for most of the people and the ensuing separation between Hindus and Muslims took place mainly because of the British rulers who were looking for a safe escape or a discreet exit from the sub-continent. After the consequent Partition, the migration phase should have taken place with some careful planning and prior arrangements, while both sides should have been given a minimum of five years to think and decide about their final destiny and life thereafter.”

Muslim exodus from India to Pakistan had already emerged as an inevitable case of necessity, particularly in those areas where communal riots were rife, brutal murders of thousands of Muslims were abounding, and rapes of women were rampant. Just the reverse, there were also many such areas both in Pakistan and India where not a single act of violence took place and no human rights abuses or atrocities at the hands of the Muslim or Hindu majority were seen even at the peak of the Partition. There were also numerous instances when Hindus did all they could do to save the lives of vulnerable Muslims by providing them refuge. By the same token, Muslims went all out to save Hindus from the wrath of rampaging assailants and raging rioters on the other side of the border.

Muslim migration from India was preordained for those families who were rightly fraught with fear that their women would be raped and murdered if they would remain in India. To ward off such a nightmare, many Muslim men went to the extent of killing their mothers, daughters, and sisters by throttling them to death with their own hands or by throwing them alive into wells found along the long journey.

With a direct correlation to the events of 1947, the Indian Muslim Diaspora was doomed to happen for the decisive lot of strong-willed Muslims who were impassioned to cross all the hurdles along the way to prove their faith credentials and when they successfully entered Pakistan they all were in floods of tears with joy, prostrating on the soil of their Promised Land as a sign of thanks to Allah Almighty.

Migration was inevitable since Muslims had managed to carve out an independent state, concurrently defeating both the British rulers and the ruling Hindu community of independent India. For the Muslims of India, mass migration to Pakistan, lock, stock, and barrel, was not a choice between the lesser of two evils; it was rather a deliberate decision taken in the name of Allah and out of the love for Islam, nor more, no less. In a word, India has already had its existence since the dawn of time; it was Pakistan that came into existence in 1947.

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