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13. Pakistan 
ATTIA HOSAIN (AH): I am told that in Karachi there are lots of people with arms going around and people don't feel secure from robbery and theft. So that is another matter. Here there is hate. But the hate has been in general.
QUESTION: There is no security in Karachi at all [1991]. AH:You see? That is the point that people have to remember that there were people who stayed back and people have to remember that when they talk of a majority voting in any way to go for Pakistan, it isn't true. There was a limited vote. That was not universal franchise in that same way as later. Q: That is true. I would say though in the provinces - Punjab, Sindh - 
AH: Punjab and Sindh already [were Muslim majority provinces], why should they have worried? They were there and [bigger] in their numbers.I mean, we are talking now of an important minority province called U.P. Right. And that area, of course, in the North West Frontier Province [NWFP] they didn't vote. If the Pathans could have followed Badshah Khan [Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan] the way they did [for Indian nationalism], that was the miracle. And I remember when I went in 1940 and my mother-in-law said to Dr. Khan Sahib [Ghaffar Khan's brother and leading nationalist Indian pathan politician, later NWFP Chief Minister] why they were not with the Muslim League. He says, why? For what reason? What are we losing or what they [the Muslim League] are [offering]? Why you are asking me? It is logical.  But the people who had to gain anything were in the minority provinces. They thought they were gaining something. They were going to this new country. They were going to a place where they would be safe. They were going to a place where they would have every thing.
Well a few did find it. More than they dreamt of and believe me quite a few found it by giving false claims and the ones who didn't want like my brother, my [Fuad] who never put in a claim and we know the people who had not that much and then had it all. He didn't because he was not going to be one of them. Besides he said I was flying away, and I was up in the air, on training courses, that where was I to sit in anybody's house, take hold of it, or fight for what? There was a man who asked me how many rooms our home had, do you think I had gone and counted all those rooms? My poor Fuad. So he suffered because he was honest, because he died without any thing, because he didn't accept the bribe for the purchase of sixty-nine planes that was offered to him. > Image © The Literary Estate of Attia Hosain (LEAH) |
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