Regionalism and Separatism
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Sindh was brought into the Raj in 1843 by General Charles Napier, who seized the province without authorization. Legend has it that he sent the message (in Latin) to Calcutta, Peccavi (“I have sinned”).11 Four years later Sindh was absorbed into the Bombay Presidency. The province was always on the periphery of empire, a distant part of the Mughal system and then for over a hundred years a British Indian backwater. While administratively part of Bombay, most of the Bombay Legislative Council legislation had not applied to Sindh, which had its own system of government and judiciary.12 Its social structure and leadership were largely intact at independence, as was its feudal order, one of the subcontinent’s most socially repressive. By 1913 the Karachi business community, then overshadowed by Bombay, had begun calling for separation, which finally took place in 1936. Despite its Muslim-majority population, Sindh was not an ethnically pure region. Bordering the Arabian Sea, it had long been accustomed to traders, invaders, and migrants from nearby regions. There were large Punjabi and Baluch communities in Sindh, and the ruling family, the Talpur tribe, had Baluch origins, although its members and many other migrants had assimilated into Sindhi culture. Like Punjab, Sindh produced a secular regional political party dominated by large landowners and feudal elites. As independence (and Pakistan) loomed, the Sindh elite had to choose between allying with the Congress or the Muslim League. The former posed a threat to the Sindhi feudals because of its liberal social policies and the potential for greater Hindu domination over the province’s commercial and professional life. The Muslim League was somewhat more attractive: it was more elitist than the Congress, and in the early 1940s “Pakistan” did not imply a single separate state but could have meant that Muslim-majority provinces like Sindh might find a place within the larger India. Several prominent Sindhis who had been opposed to the formation of Pakistan found their fears borne out after partition.13 Seventy-three percent of the migrants to the new state of Pakistan in 1947 were Punjabis, and most of these settled in Pakistan’s Punjab. The small number of Urdu speakers who migrated to Punjab had little difficulty settling there, mostly in dispersed groups; while they retain Urdu as a mother tongue, most are fluent in Punjabi. The problem for Sindh, which received only 20 percent of the Indian migrants, was different. The bulk of the migrants to Sindh