For the Pakistani Muslim immigrants in the US though, especially the Urdu speaking among them, the aching nerve hurts more painfully than Donald Trump might ever realise. It is rather a deep cut wound that bleeds since long. His warning came as a cruel reminder of the destruction attached to dislocation that they have been so familiar to, for at least three generations now.
Muslims were the major community involved in the enormous compulsory population transfers that had taken place in the aftermath of the two great wars during the first half of previous century. The end of overseas colonialism had given birth to the age of nationalism. Each nation wanted its own state. The re-demarcation of state boundaries in turn caused massive human transfers.
First major compulsory population exchange took place between Turkey and Greece under a convention signed between the two governments in Switzerland in 1923. The agreed mutual exchange was based not on language or ethnicity, but upon religious identity. It involved about all the Christian citizens of Turkey including its Turkish speaking Orthodox natives totalling around 1. 5 million. From Greece, about half a million Muslims including Greek-speaking Muslim natives relocated to Turkey.
Second, in fact the largest of all, massive compulsory expulsion that came with the partition of India in 1947, was also based on religious identity. The 1951 census in Pakistan estimated the number of displaced Muslims in the country close to 7.3 million. A similar number of non-Muslim migrants were counted in India. But the exchange actually continued till 1971.
Unlike the Turkish-Greek exchange though, the massive population transfer between India and Pakistan was essentially forced by an unending series of savage afflictions of death and destruction. It was neither a mutually agreed occurrence based on any registered understanding, nor a segment of the Partition Plan. It happened absolutely unplanned, completely non-managed and hugely violent. The British Empire had ceased its control. The new government of India enjoyed authority over the entire British-created infrastructure and administrative machinery but it showed no interest to facilitate or protect the Muslim population being compulsorily expelled by the non-Muslim majority. The new government in Pakistan had started from scratch and thus was not equipped to manage this kind of enormous unforeseen responsibility.
Therefore, the unprecedented episode of monumental inter-communal violence, and the miseries related to mass displacement across the sub-continent went mostly unreported and unrecorded. It was not a civil war between two or more armed communities, but an enlarged scenario of unannounced turbulence where the powerful killed the weak under monstrous fits of lunacy. Starting from religious hatred, it soon converted into an alligator-like arousal to kill anyone and everyone assailable in sight.
Most of times, gangs of armed terminators would attack the defenceless, helpless and hunger-stricken caravans of migrants. The attackers would murder all the men, rape all the women and later either kill or abduct them. Muslims were slaughtered and expelled not only in the provinces where they were in minority, but also where they were in majority. They were deprived of their properties, households, precious belongings and all other comforts under a sudden onslaught of death and destruction.
Sir Robert Francis Mudie, the first governor of Pakistani Punjab, reported that at least 500,000 Muslims had been killed around the entry points of his province from the Indian side. The British High Commissioner in Karachi put the total number of the butchered Muslims to 800,000. Census later suggested the number of Muslim missing persons - those who left India but did not reach Pakistan - to be 1.26 million. But these were not real statistics.
India never reported as to how many Muslims had been killed during rioting all across that vast country. A year before Partition, an unrecorded number of Muslims had also been killed during religious riots in Bihar, Calcutta and adjoining areas following the Direct Action Day protests. Unofficial estimates placed the total number of Muslims killed during partition violence somewhere around 2.5 million. The real number could be even higher.
Trains reached Lahore railway station fully loaded up by the slaughtered Muslims, with bogies amply stuffed up with the separately chopped sensitive parts of Muslim women bodies. Much later, under the Liaquat-Nehru Pact of 1950, a small bit of abducted Muslim women were recovered from East Punjab where they had been forced to convert to other religions. But many more of them could never be found.
No tribunals were established to fix responsibility, not to talk of awarding punishments to culprits and compensating the aggrieved. Everyone pretended as if it had all happened under a natural calamity; or as if all those killed, wounded and deprived did not fall under any state's legal domain. Apparently a department of settlement and rehabilitation had been working, but most of its operations were based on forgery and fraud of properties.
Just about when things were going to appear almost normal, another giant convulsion came to haunt the Urdu-speaking Pakistanis in 1971 during the birth of Bangladesh, when more or less a similar scenario was repeated. This time the partition, or separation, was based on language. Nevertheless, the Urdu-speaking Muslims living in East Pakistan were the target. There are still at least 300,000 stateless Urdu-speaking people stranded in isolated camps of Bangladesh who have nowhere to go. Again, no compensation or support came to help the affected and deprived.
History then repeated itself in a farce starting 1985, when a strange re-enactment was gradually built up in the urban areas of Sindh. A threat of compulsory expulsion emerged out of nowhere, specifically targeting the Urdu-speaking population in the province. Unidentified powers promoted and financed a few self-imposed leaders who hurled threats of "throwing all Urdu-speaking persons into the sea," for the purported reason that "they were not the sons of soil."
Unidentified shooting and arson gangs burned down homes and killed Urdu-speaking population without provocation. Then, as if in retaliation, another set of unknown gangs of saboteurs attacked the localities where people from other languages lived. They pretended to be taking revenge on behalf of the Urdu-speaking victims. Very soon, a stage of clandestine linguistic rioting was set in Karachi, Hyderabad and Sukkur, for which no basis could be found on ground. The perpetrators of these riots returned to the oblivion after about two years. But by that time they had sown the seeds of a concealed but very strong sense of insecurity deep in the hearts of Urdu-speaking population of Sindh.
There were contradictory reports in the independent media about the identity of these rioters. Some traced their footprints to the doors of the dictatorial regime of General Ziaul Haq. Some others termed it an inter-communal fight for resources and opportunities of urban Sindh, while some said it was a reaction to the piling up of unresolved civic problems which had assumed gigantic status. Yet some others smelled involvement of local or foreign secret agencies or international conspiracies. But neither of all these theories could ever be proved or substantiated in a foolproof legal manner.
No courts took up any complaints - no suo moto action was taken either - to find out who had actually been behind these riots. After General Zia, one democratic government after the other took power in Islamabad. But none of them ever cared to investigate into the mass murder, arson and plunder starting 1985 in urban areas of Sindh. No responsibility was fixed and no one was ever punished.
In that uncertain situation, rumours had been whispered, spread and believed easily. The absence of justice only confirmed and intensified the lurking threat of another compulsory expulsion facing the Urdu-speaking population. As a result, three decades have passed but the wound is still fresh and it often bleeds whenever touched even lightly. Therefore, Donald Trump is not the first one to scratch this injury. However, at least his co-runners among the Republicans, as wells as the Democrats, had had the courtesy to make public their strong opposition to such a wild idea. President Obama was in fact the first one to denounce it by calling it against the very spirit of the US Constitution.
While in Pakistan, unfortunately, nobody has ever moved on behalf of the state to provide a straight and solid assurance to the scared souls that the danger of a fresh uprooting is false and baseless. No authority has ever made serious effort to diagnose this very complex anxiety and to declare that the Urdu-speaking population would receive all protection from the state just in case any internal or external force ever tries to forcibly expel them. This is perhaps the single biggest reason behind the pessimistic and gloomy political and social trends prevailing among the Urdu-speaking population of Sindh and the resultant militarization of society.
In the US, Trump or no Trump, the theme, even though already declared dead on arrival, is likely to linger on in the top debates for quite some time. Though it would be far from reality to imagine that the US Congress might pass an immigration law on religious lines, or the next occupant of the White House may sanction a shutdown on Muslims just on the basis of their religious identity.