Much before the calamitous events of Aug-Sept 1947, the north-eastern region of what is now Pakistan saw targeted attacks on Sikh villages.

Born and brought up in Nowshera Cantonment in Peshawar, I was 14 at the time of Partition. An important cantonment of British India, it had the Royal Air Force Centre and the Sikh Regimental Centre. The city was home to a small civilian population and was surrounded by Pakhtun villages. We were taught Urdu and Persian in school and my father conversed with his patients in fluent Pashto. Nowshera was famous for the great battle in 1823 that resulted in a decisive victory for Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s army against the Afghans, with the annexation of Peshawar valley beyond Khyber.

Both my parents belonged to Choha Khalsa in Kahuta tehsil of Rawalpindi district in Pothohar, a plateau in north-eastern Pakistan comprising the districts of Rawalpindi, Attock and Jhelum. Sikh…

Photographs of pre-partition havelis of Kalanaur, Rohtak.

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In his report, Justice Mehar Chand Mahajan recommended that the boundary line should be near the Ravi including Lahore in the East Punjab and Justice Teja Singh advocated that the boundary line should be near the Chenab, including parts of the districts of Sheikhupura and Gujranwala, Montgomery and Lyallpur in the East Punjab. The Hindu-Sikh case rested on the economic conditions as the non-Muslim had played a major part in the development of the Central Punjab. The Bari Doab and more particularly the districts of Gurdaspur, Amritsar and Lahore had been described by historians and settlement officers as the “home land of the Sikhs* who owned more than two-thirds of the area and paid more than two-thirds of the land revenue of this tract. This Sikh peasant proprietors’ tract had been developed as a single unit along the Upper Bari Doab Canal which had been dug, it was ingeniously claimed,…

In this article "When Emperors turned on Gurus", author Parvez Mahmood writes about the historical injustices suffered by the Sikhs that caused a growing rift between the two communities in Punjab.

Excerpt ⓒThe Friday Times: