Where We Left Off
Thirteen parts have been about the land between the rivers, and since 1947 almost entirely about the eastern half of it. This part fixes that, and then follows Punjabis out of the subcontinent altogether.
Part 13 covered Indian Punjab from the publication of the Radcliffe line to the present day. It began on 17 August 1947, when Punjabis were finally told which country they were in, two days after independence.
It went through the killing, which was organised rather than mad, and which nobody counted — estimates still range from 200,000 to two million. It went through the walking: roughly ten million people crossing in both directions in about four months, almost none of it planned, because every leadership had publicly assumed minorities would stay.
Then it followed what east Punjab built out of half a province. The standard acre and the graded cut, which resettled millions of farming families and left the landless with nothing to claim. A capital built from scratch at Chandigarh, which both halves then argued over. Nineteen years of refusal over the Punjabi Suba, settled in 1966 by a division that left the capital and the river water unresolved. The Green Revolution, which fed India and spent an aquifer. The 1980s, which are still being argued about and which no court or commission has closed. And a present of falling income rank, debt, emigration, and a water table dropping under the fields.
What Part 13 did not do is look west. That is the gap this part fills, and it is a large one.
Indian Punjab has roughly 30 million people. Pakistani Punjab has roughly 128 million.
So for every Punjabi in India there are around four in Pakistan. When people say "Punjab" and mean the Indian state, they are naming about a fifth of the Punjabis in the world.
Add several million more in Britain, Canada, the United States, Australia and the Gulf, and the picture changes again. This series has spent thirteen parts on a homeland and one part is now owed to everybody who is not in the smaller half of it.
How this book is built#
Six kinds of box run through every part of this series. If you have arrived at the last part first, here is what each one does.
What it does: explains a hard word the moment it first appears, so you never have to carry an unexplained term or go hunting in a glossary.
What it does: turns a number you cannot picture into something you can. You have just seen one.
What it does: shows the evidence itself — the census column, the recruitment register, the remittance figure — and says plainly what it can and cannot prove.
What it does: sets out a question where serious people disagree. Each side gets its strongest honest case, then a verdict block says where things stand and what would settle it.
What it does: digs out something a claim quietly takes for granted without proving. It is the signature of this series, and this part turns it on the series itself before the end.
What it does: closes every chapter with the key points in the plainest words available. Read only these and you would still have the story.
A warning about this part#
Part 13 warned that its material was inside living memory. This part has a different problem: much of it is inside living politics.
Some of what follows is contested between Pakistan's provinces. Some is contested between India and Canada, at the level of expelled diplomats. Some concerns organisations that are legal in one country and banned in another. Writing about any of it invites the reader to check which passport the author holds.
I hold an Indian one. You should know that, and you should read this part with it in mind, particularly Chapters Three, Nine and the Afterword. Where I think my own position is likely to be pulling at me, I have said so in the text rather than hoping you would not notice.
1The City That Kept Its Buildings
Lahore came through 1947 with its architecture intact and about a third of its population gone. What a city loses when it loses a class is not visible from the street.
1.1 — What Lahore was#
For most of the period covered by Parts 6 to 12, Lahore was Punjab. It was the seat of the Mughal governors, the capital of Ranjit Singh's empire, and then the capital of British Punjab.
By the 1940s it was the intellectual centre of north-west India. Government College and Forman Christian College trained the region's administrators. The University of the Punjab, founded in 1882, was one of the oldest in the subcontinent. The Mall carried the bookshops and the newspapers. Anarkali was the largest bazaar in the province.
It was also thoroughly mixed. In the 1941 census Lahore city was roughly six parts Muslim to four parts Hindu and Sikh — but that proportion understates what the minority was. Hindus and Sikhs owned a very large share of the city's commercial property, ran much of its trade and moneylending, and were heavily represented among its lawyers, doctors, teachers, printers and shopkeepers.
Picture a city where four people in ten belong to a minority — and where that minority holds most of the shops on the main street, a large share of the surgeries, and a great many of the desks in the courts and the colleges.
Now remove them in a single season. The buildings are still there. Every one of them is empty of the person who knew how to run it.
1.2 — What happened in August#
Lahore burned before the border was announced. Fires in the old city through the summer of 1947 destroyed whole mohallas, and the pattern was the one Part 13 described: organised bands, not random crowds.
Almost the entire Hindu and Sikh population left. In their place came refugees from east Punjab — from Amritsar, Ludhiana, Jalandhar and beyond — arriving with nothing.
Muhajir: migrant, from the Arabic. Used in Pakistan for those who came from India in and after 1947. In Punjab the incoming Punjabi Muslims were absorbed relatively quickly, because they arrived among people who spoke their language and often had kin nearby.
In Sindh it worked differently. Urdu-speaking migrants from north India arrived in a province with a different language, settled mainly in Karachi and Hyderabad, and became a permanent distinct community — the group the word now mainly refers to in Pakistani politics.
That contrast matters, and Chapter Three returns to it: Punjab's refugees became Punjabis; Sindh's became a separate people.
1.3 — Evacuee property#
Both new states had to decide what to do with the property of the people who had gone. Both did roughly the same thing: declared it evacuee property, vested it in a custodian, and allotted it against the claims of arrivals.
Part 13 described the eastern version — the standard acre and the graded cut. The western version faced a different arithmetic. West Punjab received fewer refugees than the property left behind could house, because the departing Hindus and Sikhs had owned disproportionately.
The consequence was that allotment in West Punjab, particularly of urban commercial property in Lahore, became one of the great openings for enrichment in early Pakistan. Claims were inflated. Well-connected arrivals did very well. Officials did well. It is one of the origin points of a pattern in Pakistani public life that people have complained about ever since.
Evacuee property is unusually well documented on both sides, because allotment required paperwork — claim forms, verification reports, custodian registers.
It is also documented by complaint. Pakistan's own commissions of inquiry into evacuee property in the 1950s recorded large-scale fraud in the claims process, and the reports survive.
What the record cannot tell you is the counterfactual: how much of the wealth concentration in Lahore's commercial classes traces to 1947 allotments rather than to later business. Nobody has traced it systematically, and the families involved are still prominent, which is one reason nobody has.
1.4 — The slow loss#
The dramatic loss in 1947 was of people. The slower loss was of function.
Lahore had been the capital of a province of nearly thirty million and the hub of a region running from Delhi to the Khyber. After 1947 it was the capital of half a province in a new country whose largest city, chief port and first capital was Karachi.
Its hinterland was cut. Amritsar, fifty kilometres away, stopped being a market and became a hostile frontier. The rail lines east went nowhere. The publishing industry, which had served readers across undivided Punjab in Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi and English, lost more than half its market overnight.
Both national stories about 1947 assume that the movement of populations was, at worst, a tragic accompaniment to a political achievement — that the states got what they needed and the people paid for it.
Underneath sits a premise worth naming: that a city is its buildings, its institutions and its land, and that populations are interchangeable inputs which can be swapped without changing what the place can do.
Lahore and Amritsar are the test of that premise, and both fail it. Lahore kept the Mughal fort, the university, the courts, the bazaars and the printing presses, and lost the density of skills that had made them work together. Amritsar kept the Golden Temple and lost the trade that had paid for the city around it.
Neither city was destroyed. Both were deskilled, and it took a generation to be visible. Notice that this is not an argument about who suffered more. It is a claim about what kind of thing a city is, and it applies identically on both sides of the line.
1.5 — Lahore now#
Lahore today is a very large city — the second largest in Pakistan, with a metropolitan population in the region of thirteen million, larger than the whole of Indian Punjab's urban population.
It is the country's cultural capital in a way Karachi and Islamabad are not: the home of its film and television industry, its literary festivals, its most famous universities, and the political base of the party that has governed Pakistan for much of the last four decades.
It has also become one of the most polluted cities in the world, with winter smog that closes schools. Chapter Five explains part of why — the smog is downstream of what happens in the fields around it, on both sides of a border that air does not observe.
Lahore was the capital of Punjab for centuries and the intellectual centre of north-west India. In 1947 it lost almost its entire Hindu and Sikh population — around four in ten people, holding far more than four-tenths of its commerce and professions.
Refugees from east Punjab replaced them in number. Evacuee property allotment in Lahore became one of early Pakistan's great openings for enrichment, and was documented as fraudulent at the time.
Punjab's refugees became Punjabis. Sindh's became muhajirs — a separate people. That difference shapes Pakistani politics to this day.
Neither Lahore nor Amritsar was destroyed. Both were deskilled — they kept their buildings and lost the people who knew how to work them.
2One Unit
For fifteen years West Pakistan abolished its own provinces and became a single block. The reason was arithmetic, and the arithmetic was about Bengal.
2.1 — The problem Pakistan was born with#
Pakistan in 1947 was two territories separated by about 1,600 kilometres of India. The western wing held Punjab, Sindh, the North-West Frontier Province and Balochistan. The eastern wing held East Bengal.
The two wings shared a religion and almost nothing else — not language, not diet, not dress, not agriculture, not climate.
East Bengal held slightly more than half of Pakistan's population — around 55 in every 100 Pakistanis at independence.
So in any system where each vote counts equally, the eastern wing wins every national election on its own, permanently, without needing a single vote from the west.
That single fact is the engine of Pakistani constitutional politics for its first twenty-four years. Nearly everything in this chapter and the next two is an attempt to manage it.
The western wing held the capital, the army, most of the senior bureaucracy inherited from the Raj, and — as Chapter Three will show — Punjab held most of that.
2.2 — Parity#
The solution adopted was called parity. East and West Pakistan would each get an equal number of seats in the national legislature, regardless of population.
But parity had a technical problem in the west. The eastern wing was one province. The western wing was four, plus a set of princely states. To hold half the seats as a bloc, the west needed to be a bloc.
So in 1955 the four provinces of the western wing were abolished and merged into a single province called West Pakistan, with its capital at Lahore. This was the One Unit scheme.
One Unit: the merger of Punjab, Sindh, the North-West Frontier Province, Balochistan and the western princely states into one province, "West Pakistan", in 1955. Undone in 1970.
Parity: the rule giving the eastern and western wings equal representation despite unequal populations. Its effect was to convert a Bengali majority into a tie.
2.3 — How it worked in practice#
One Unit was presented as a modernising measure that would dissolve narrow provincial loyalties into a single national identity. Some of its supporters believed that.
What it did in practice was concentrate administration in Lahore, staffed largely by Punjabis and by Urdu-speaking migrants, and remove the institutions through which Sindhis, Baloch and Pashtuns had any separate say.
Sindh lost its provincial assembly, its own budget and the status of Sindhi in administration. Balochistan, whose incorporation had been contested from the beginning, lost what limited autonomy it had.
Pakistan was a new country with weak institutions and strong local identities, and its survival required building a national one. Simplifying four provinces plus princely states into one administration was an efficiency measure as much as a political one, and it removed a layer of feudal princely government that nobody now defends. Parity was the price of keeping one country together, and the alternative to parity was a west wing that would never accept national decisions made without it.
Whatever the stated aim, the effect was to make Lahore the capital of everything west of India and to place the administration of four peoples in the hands of the largest. Provincial identities did not dissolve; they hardened, because they now had a single visible opponent. Sindhi and Baloch nationalism as organised movements largely date from this period. And the argument that parity was needed to hold the country together is undermined by what happened when the country was finally asked to vote as one.
What would settle it: nothing decisive. The internal records show officials arguing both ways, which is usually what internal records show.
Why people care so much: because if One Unit was Punjabi consolidation, then Pakistan's smaller provinces have a grievance that predates every later one, and every subsequent complaint about Punjabi dominance is a continuation rather than a new claim.
2.4 — Undone#
One Unit was dissolved in 1970 by the military government of Yahya Khan. The four provinces were restored. At the same time parity was abandoned, and the coming national election was to be held on the basis of one person, one vote.
That was the first genuinely free national election in Pakistan's history, and its result is the subject of Chapter Four.
Both parity and One Unit rested on an assumption that was never stated as a proposition, because stating it would have been impossible: that a numerical majority which is culturally different from the ruling group is a problem to be managed rather than a population to be governed by.
Notice that this is exactly the assumption the Muslim League had spent the 1940s attacking. Its whole case for Pakistan was that a permanent minority cannot be secure under a majority that does not share its culture. Part 12 set that argument out at full strength.
Within eight years the same state had inverted the argument. The Bengali majority was to be balanced, capped and eventually outvoted — for reasons that read, almost word for word, like the case Congress had made against Pakistan.
I am not scoring a point. The mechanism is general and it is worth extracting: an argument made by a group about its own vulnerability rarely survives that group acquiring a state. The same could be said, in Part 13, about how independent India handled the demand for a Punjabi state.
Pakistan began as two wings 1,600 km apart, and the eastern wing held the majority of the population. Every constitutional device of the first two decades was a response to that.
Parity gave each wing equal seats, converting a Bengali majority into a tie. One Unit, in 1955, merged the four western provinces into a single province with its capital at Lahore, so the west could act as a bloc.
Its effect was to concentrate administration in Punjabi and Urdu-speaking hands and strip Sindh and Balochistan of separate institutions. Sindhi and Baloch nationalism as organised movements largely date from this period.
Pakistan was founded on the argument that a permanent minority cannot be safe under a different majority. Within eight years it was managing a majority it did not want to be governed by.
3The Sword Arm, Again
The British built an army out of a few Punjabi districts. Pakistan inherited it, and has been governed by it, directly or indirectly, for much of its existence.
3.1 — What was inherited#
Part 11 described the martial-races policy: after 1857 the British rebuilt the Indian Army around a theory that certain communities were natural soldiers, and concentrated recruitment in the north-west. Part 12 showed the result — Punjab supplying roughly half of India's combat soldiers in the First World War.
When the army was divided in 1947, Pakistan received a share of the units. But the recruitment catchment did not divide evenly, because it had never been spread evenly in the first place. The heaviest-recruited districts of undivided Punjab were in the north-west — Rawalpindi, Jhelum, Attock, Chakwal — and those went to Pakistan.
Historically, a very large majority of the Pakistan Army's soldiers came from Punjab, with a further significant share from the Pashtun districts next door. Figures around three-quarters Punjabi were commonly cited for much of the twentieth century.
Concentrate it further. Within Punjab, recruitment clustered in a handful of districts on the Potohar plateau, north of the Salt Range — an area with a small fraction of Pakistan's population supplying a strikingly large share of its soldiers.
The army has recruited more broadly in recent decades, and the proportions have moved. But an institution's character is set by who filled it for its first fifty years.
Potohar (or Pothohar): the plateau region of northern Punjab around Rawalpindi, Jhelum, Chakwal and Attock. Dry, broken country, historically poor farmland.
That last point is the explanation, not the ethnicity. Where land yields little, a salaried job with a pension is worth more, and a district that sends soldiers for three generations develops the networks and the expectations that keep sending them. The British called this a martial race. It is better described as a labour market.
3.2 — The bureaucracy#
The same inheritance ran through the civil service. Pakistan received a small number of senior Indian Civil Service officers, and the recruitment base for the service that replaced it was concentrated in Punjab and among Urdu-speaking migrants.
Pakistan responded, from the 1940s onward, with a quota system for federal employment, allocating shares of posts by province.
The federal quota is public policy, published and precise, which makes this one of the few claims in this part that needs no estimation.
Under the long-standing formula, a small share of federal posts is filled on open merit, and the remainder is distributed by province. Punjab's share is set at 50 per cent, Sindh's at 19, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's at about 11.5, Balochistan's at 6, with smaller allocations for the remaining territories.
Two things follow, and they point in opposite directions. Punjab's formal share is close to its population share, so the quota is not on its face a Punjabi privilege — it was designed to cap Punjab and protect smaller provinces. But a formula that guarantees the largest province half of the federal state, permanently, also guarantees that the federal state will feel Punjabi to everybody else.
3.3 — What this looks like from elsewhere#
Here is where I have to be careful, and I said in the front matter that I would flag it.
An Indian writing about Punjabi dominance in Pakistan is writing about a rival state's internal fault line, and there is a well-worn Indian habit of doing that with enthusiasm. So I will report the complaint as those making it put it, note what the other side says, and leave it.
The complaint, made in Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, runs like this. The army is Punjabi. The bureaucracy is half Punjabi by rule. The largest share of federal development spending goes to Punjab. Water from the Indus is allocated in a way Sindh disputes. Gas from Balochistan heats Punjabi homes while Balochistan remains the poorest province. And when provinces have objected, the response has often been military.
The reply from Punjab, and from the federal government, runs like this. Punjab has more than half the country's people, so of course it has most of the soldiers, most of the officials, most of the seats and most of the spending — that is what proportion means, and a quota that caps Punjab at 50 per cent actually gives it less than its share. Punjab pays the largest share of tax. And treating a majority's ordinary weight as a conspiracy is how federations fall apart.
Dominance is not only about numbers; it is about whether the institutions of the state are experienced as belonging to one group. The army — the most powerful institution in the country — was built from a handful of Punjabi districts and has ruled directly for roughly half of Pakistan's existence. The national language is not the language of any province's majority, but it is the language of the migrant community that allied with Punjab in the capital. One Unit made this structural. Every province that has objected has faced force. That pattern is not what proportion produces.
Punjab holds slightly over half the population and slightly over half the National Assembly. Its formal quota share is below its population share. Punjab is not a bloc: it contains bitter internal divisions, including the Seraiki south's own case against Lahore, which Chapter Seven covers. Military rule has never been a Punjabi project — Pakistan's most consequential dictator came to power against a Punjabi prime minister, and Punjab has produced the country's largest civilian opposition to army rule. Calling a majority a dominator is a way of arguing that its votes should count less.
What would settle it: nothing settles a dispute of this kind, but the practical test is what happens under the 18th Amendment devolution described in Chapter Seven. If provinces genuinely control their own revenue and administration, the complaint should shrink. If it does not shrink, that is evidence.
Why people care so much: because Pakistan has already lost one wing over exactly this question, and everybody involved knows it.
Pakistan inherited the martial-races recruitment machine described in Parts 11 and 12, and inherited the districts it recruited from — the dry Potohar plateau of northern Punjab.
That was never about ethnicity. Poor land makes a salaried job with a pension valuable, and three generations of it builds a pipeline. The British called it a martial race. It was a labour market.
Federal jobs are allocated by a published quota. Punjab's share is 50 per cent — designed to cap Punjab, and also guaranteeing the federal state will feel Punjabi to everyone else.
Punjab's formal weight is roughly proportional to its population. The complaint from Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is not about the arithmetic — it is about which institutions can ignore them at no cost.
41971
Pakistan held one free election, did not accept the result, and lost the majority of its own population. Punjab has never fully reckoned with its part in it.
4.1 — The election#
In December 1970 Pakistan voted, for the first time, on one person one vote, with the provinces restored and parity abandoned.
The result was exactly what the arithmetic in Chapter Two predicted. The Awami League, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and standing on a programme of Bengali autonomy, won an outright majority of the National Assembly — almost entirely from East Pakistan. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party won the largest share in the west, above all in Punjab and Sindh.
The Awami League won a majority in a house of just over 300 seats without contesting seriously in the west at all. The PPP won a large bloc in the west and almost nothing in the east.
So the country had produced two regional victories and one national winner, and the national winner was the one the army and the western politicians did not want.
The rule everyone had just agreed to said the Awami League should form the government. Nobody in the west was willing to say it out loud.
The Assembly was postponed. Negotiations failed. On 25 March 1971 the army launched an operation in East Pakistan.
4.2 — The war#
What followed was nine months of mass violence, a Bengali armed resistance, a refugee flow into India in the millions, Indian intervention in December, and the surrender of the Pakistani forces in Dhaka on 16 December 1971. East Pakistan became Bangladesh.
This is the most bitterly contested casualty dispute in South Asia, and I am going to handle it the way Part 13 handled 1947 and 1984: give the range, name the methods, and refuse to pick.
Three million people were killed and around 200,000 women raped, in a campaign that deliberately targeted Bengali intellectuals, Hindus and Awami League supporters. This figure has been official in Bangladesh since 1972 and is embedded in its national memory and its law. Its defenders point to the systematic character of the killings, the specific targeting of the professional class, and the scale of the refugee flow — around ten million people crossing into India — as corroboration that the violence was extreme and general.
The Hamoodur Rahman Commission, appointed by Pakistan itself, produced figures in the region of 26,000 dead. Its defenders note it is the only inquiry with access to the military's own records and testimony, and that it was highly critical of the army's conduct and leadership — not a whitewash.
Many scholars working outside both states put the toll somewhere between several hundred thousand and a million or more, arguing that three million is not supported by demographic evidence while 26,000 is far too low to be consistent with the refugee flows, the eyewitness record and the pattern of destruction.
What would settle it: nothing available. No agreed count was attempted at the time, and both states have a settled national position that makes revising it politically impossible.
Why people care so much: because the number is the foundation of one country's founding story and the accusation against another's army. Notice this is the same structure as the disputes in Part 13. The pattern across this whole series is consistent: where a killing is politically foundational, nobody counts, and the absence of a count is not an accident.
4.3 — What Punjab has done with it#
Here is what is distinctive about 1971 from a Punjabi point of view, and it is the reason this chapter is in a history of Punjab at all.
The army that fought in East Pakistan was recruited overwhelmingly from Punjab and the districts next to it. The political leadership that refused to hand power to the election winner was based in Punjab and Sindh. The war was fought in the name of national unity by an institution that one province largely staffed.
And in Pakistani public memory, 1971 is remembered mainly as a defeat inflicted by India, with the Indian intervention placed at the centre and the nine months before it placed at the edge. The Hamoodur Rahman Commission report — Pakistan's own inquiry — was not published for nearly three decades, and reached the public only after it leaked.
Pakistani writers, journalists and historians have made this criticism themselves, repeatedly and at some cost. I am reporting their argument, not supplying an Indian one.
The suppression of the Hamoodur Rahman report is itself the best-documented fact here: a commission appointed by a government, reporting to that government, and then withheld from the public for around thirty years.
That tells you something reliable without needing to resolve the casualty figures. A state that publishes an inquiry is willing to be judged by it. A state that buries one for a generation has read it.
Be careful about the reverse inference, though. Suppression proves discomfort. It does not, by itself, establish any particular number.
In Pakistan's first free election, in 1970, the Awami League won an outright national majority almost entirely from East Pakistan. The Assembly was postponed rather than seated.
The army operation from March 1971 led to nine months of mass violence, around ten million refugees into India, Indian intervention, and the creation of Bangladesh in December.
Casualty estimates run from about 26,000 in Pakistan's own inquiry to three million in Bangladesh's official account, with independent scholars mostly between. Nobody counted.
The army was largely Punjabi, the leadership that refused the result was western, and Pakistan's own commission of inquiry was kept from the public for about thirty years.
5Water on the Other Side
Part 13 left Indian Punjab pumping an aquifer dry. The western half has the same crops, more water, and a different way of ruining land.
5.1 — What the treaty required Pakistan to build#
Part 13 covered the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 from the Indian side: three eastern rivers to India, three western rivers to Pakistan. Here is the western consequence.
Pakistani Punjab's canal colonies had been fed partly by the Ravi and the Sutlej. Under the treaty those rivers were now India's to use. So Pakistan had to replace that water from the western rivers, and to do it Pakistan had to build.
The treaty came with funding for exactly that. Two very large dams followed — Mangla on the Jhelum, completed in 1967, and Tarbela on the Indus, completed in 1976 — along with a system of link canals carrying water eastward from the western rivers into the areas the eastern rivers used to serve.
Think of it as replumbing a country. Punjab's irrigation had been built over sixty years to carry water from where it fell to where it was needed. The treaty cut off two of the taps, so Pakistan built a set of canals running across the natural drainage to move water from the remaining taps into the old pipes.
Tarbela is one of the largest earth-filled dams ever constructed. Mangla flooded a substantial area of the Mirpur district — and Chapter Eight will show that this single fact explains a large part of who lives in Bradford and Birmingham today.
5.2 — The Pakistani Green Revolution#
The package described in Part 13 — short-stemmed high-yielding wheat, fertiliser, assured irrigation, tubewells, credit — arrived in Pakistani Punjab at essentially the same time and for the same reason.
The results were also similar. Wheat output rose sharply. Punjab became the province that fed the country. Pakistani Punjab today produces the large majority of Pakistan's wheat on a share of its land, and is the centre of its rice, cotton and sugarcane as well.
The distribution of gains differed in one important way, and it comes from Part 13's Chapter Four. East Punjab's land resettlement had broken up very large holdings through the graded cut. West Punjab's had not. Pakistani Punjab entered the Green Revolution with a landholding structure still containing large estates, so the benefits of tubewells, tractors and credit concentrated further up.
5.3 — A different way to ruin land#
Indian Punjab's problem, as Part 13 set out, is that the water table is falling. Pakistani Punjab's classic problem is the opposite, and it is older.
Waterlogging: when irrigation puts more water into the ground than drains away, the water table rises until it reaches the root zone and the plants drown.
Salinity: all water carries dissolved salt. When water sits near the surface in a hot climate it evaporates and leaves the salt behind. Do this for decades and a white crust forms, and the field stops growing anything.
These are the two failure modes of large canal irrigation in a dry country, and British Punjab was warned about them in the nineteenth century.
Pakistan has fought this since the 1960s with drainage programmes and with tubewells used to pump the water table down. Large areas of Punjab and Sindh have been affected, and substantial acreage has gone out of production or lost yield.
Two further pressures have arrived since. The heavy use of tubewells has, in parts of Pakistani Punjab, produced falling water tables of the Indian kind alongside the waterlogging of the older kind — sometimes in the same province. And the rivers themselves are fed by Himalayan glaciers whose behaviour is changing.
Every water institution in this series — the colonial canal department, the Indus Waters Treaty, the inter-state tribunals of Part 13, the replacement works of this chapter — assumes that water problems are solved by moving water. Build a canal, sign a share, sink a well.
That assumption is so deep that it is invisible. It is the reason a treaty that divided rivers between two countries was accompanied by money to build dams, rather than by anything at all about what would be grown with the result.
Look at what both Punjabs actually produce. Rice and sugarcane in a semi-arid climate on one side; rice, sugarcane and cotton on the other. These are the thirstiest crops available, grown in one of the drier inhabited regions on earth, in both countries, under different governments, different ideologies and different treaties.
Neither state has ever seriously attempted the other lever — changing the crop. The engineering lever is visible, fundable and attributable to a politician. The cropping lever requires telling millions of farmers to grow something with no guaranteed buyer.
So the same mistake is being made on both sides of a border by two states that agree on almost nothing else. That is a strong sign the cause is structural rather than national.
Cross-border comparison is unusually reliable here, because the two states publish agricultural statistics for their own purposes and neither is designed to be compared with the other.
Satellite measurement, as Part 13 noted, does not care about borders at all. The same gravity data that shows groundwater loss in north-west India covers the Indus basin as a whole, and the whole basin shows depletion.
The clearest shared evidence, though, is one you can see from an aeroplane in November: the smoke. Rice stubble is burned after harvest on both sides of the border, and the resulting smog settles over Lahore and Amritsar and Delhi together. Air does not stop at Wagah, and the fact that both capitals blame each other every winter is a good illustration of how little the border helps.
The Indus Waters Treaty gave Pakistan the western rivers and the money to replumb the country — Mangla in 1967, Tarbela in 1976, and link canals moving water east into the areas the Ravi and Sutlej used to serve.
Pakistani Punjab ran the same Green Revolution package as Indian Punjab, but on a landholding structure that had never been broken up by a graded cut — so the gains concentrated further up.
Its classic problem is the opposite of Indian Punjab's: waterlogging and salt from a rising water table, not a falling one. In places it now has both.
Both Punjabs grow the thirstiest crops available in one of the drier places on earth. Neither state has ever seriously tried the one lever that would work, because moving water is fundable and changing crops is not.
6The Language That Lost
Punjabi is the mother tongue of more Pakistanis than any other language. It is not taught in Pakistani schools. Punjabis themselves decided that.
6.1 — The numbers#
Punjabi is the largest mother tongue in Pakistan. In recent census returns it has been given by around 37 to 39 per cent of the population, well ahead of Pashto, Sindhi and Seraiki. Urdu, the national language, is the mother tongue of well under a tenth.
Out of every hundred Pakistanis, roughly 38 grow up speaking Punjabi and roughly 7 grow up speaking Urdu.
Schooling in Punjab is in Urdu and English. A Punjabi child is educated in a language spoken at home by about one family in fourteen, and is not taught to read or write the language spoken by his own.
Compare Sindh, where Sindhi is a compulsory school subject and a medium of instruction. Sindhi has fewer speakers than Punjabi and far more institutional protection.
6.2 — Why Urdu#
Urdu was chosen as the national language at independence for a reason that made sense at the time. It was associated with Muslim identity across north India, it was the language of the Muslim League's leadership and of the migrants, and — crucially — it was nobody's provincial majority language.
That last point was the attraction. A national language belonging to no province could not be accused of favouring one.
It did not work out that way in the east, where the attempt to impose Urdu on Bengali speakers produced the language movement of 1952, deaths in Dhaka, and the first serious crack in the country. That story belongs to Bangladesh, but Chapter Two explains why it began.
6.3 — Why Punjabis went along with it#
What needs explaining is not why Urdu was chosen. It is why Punjab — the largest province, with the largest language, and with most of the army and half the bureaucracy — accepted a national language that was not its own, and then declined to teach its own at all.
Several reasons are usually given, and they compound.
Punjabi Muslim elites had used Urdu and Persian for writing for a long time; Part 12 noted that Urdu was the language of the courts and much of the press in British Punjab. Punjabi was the language of the home, the field and the song, not of the ledger.
Punjabi's main written tradition in the Indian half is in Gurmukhi, the script of the Sikh scripture, which after 1947 made written Punjabi feel to many Pakistani Punjabis like a religiously marked thing belonging to somebody else.
Shahmukhi: the Perso-Arabic script used to write Punjabi in Pakistan. It is the older of the two scripts for Punjabi in continuous literary use — Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah and Sultan Bahu were written in it.
Gurmukhi: the script used for Punjabi in India, and the script of the Guru Granth Sahib.
One language, two scripts, and speakers on each side who cannot read the other's books. Two people can talk to each other fluently and be unable to exchange a letter.
And there was a straightforward incentive. Punjab already held the army and the bureaucracy. Pressing a Punjabi language claim would have cost it the moral position it needed to hold the federation together — and would have given Sindh, Balochistan and the Frontier a much sharper argument against Punjabi dominance than the one Chapter Three described.
Punjabi-language activists argue the state deliberately marginalised the largest language of the country: no medium of instruction, minimal official patronage, no requirement in public examinations, and a persistent framing of Punjabi as rustic and of Urdu as refined. A language kept out of school for three generations does not decline by accident.
Others argue nobody had to suppress it, because the Punjabi elite gave it up voluntarily in exchange for something worth more. Urdu was the currency of the federal state Punjab dominated. Adopting it cost Punjabis nothing they valued and bought them the leadership of a country. On this reading Punjabi did not lose; it was spent.
A third position holds that the premise is wrong. Punjabi was overwhelmingly oral for most of its speakers, everywhere, including in India before 1947. What happened after independence is that India built a written Punjabi through the state, and Pakistan did not. The difference is not decline in the west but construction in the east.
What would settle it: the outcome of the current Punjabi-language campaigns in Pakistan. There is a real movement — publishers, a small body of new literature, court petitions for Punjabi as a medium of instruction. Whether it succeeds is a live test.
Why people care so much: because in India, Punjabi is the marker of a religious minority's identity, and in Pakistan it is the marker of a majority's provincialism. The same language carries opposite political weight on either side of one border.
6.4 — The other language in Punjab#
There is a further complication inside Pakistani Punjab. The southern districts — Multan, Bahawalpur, Dera Ghazi Khan and around — speak Seraiki, which around a tenth or more of Pakistanis give as their mother tongue.
Whether Seraiki is a separate language or a dialect of Punjabi is disputed, and the dispute is not really linguistic. Recognising Seraiki as a language supports the demand for a separate southern province, which Chapter Seven takes up. Denying it supports keeping Punjab whole.
You have met this exact structure before. In Part 13, whether Punjabi was distinct from Hindi decided whether a Punjabi state was justified, and the census answer became a political declaration. The same mechanism is now running in the other Punjab, one level down.
Punjabi is Pakistan's largest mother tongue — around 38 in every 100 people — and it is not a medium of instruction anywhere in Punjab. Urdu, the national language, is the mother tongue of about 7 in 100.
Urdu was chosen precisely because it belonged to no province. In the east that produced the Bengali language movement and the first crack in the country.
Punjabi elites accepted it, partly from habit, partly because written Punjabi in Gurmukhi felt like somebody else's, and partly because pressing a language claim would have cost Punjab the neutrality it needed to run the federation.
One language, two scripts. Two Punjabis can talk fluently and be unable to read each other's books.
7Punjab Inside Pakistan
The province that is accused of running the country is also the province where the country's civilian politics has been fought hardest — and it has its own internal south.
7.1 — Lahore as a political centre#
Pakistan's capital moved from Karachi to Islamabad in the 1960s. Its political centre of gravity, in the civilian sense, moved to Lahore.
Punjab holds more than half the seats in the National Assembly. No party has formed a national government without winning Punjab. That single sentence explains a great deal of Pakistani political behaviour, including behaviour that looks irrational from outside.
7.2 — Zia, and what came after#
The military government of General Zia-ul-Haq, from 1977 to 1988, matters here for two reasons.
The first is the programme of Islamisation — changes to law, to education and to the courts whose effects are still being argued about across Pakistan.
The second is local and specific. Zia's government cultivated a new urban Punjabi commercial and industrial class as a political base, in deliberate contrast to the landed families who had dominated before. Out of that came the political career of Nawaz Sharif, a Lahore industrialist, and the party that has governed Punjab for most of the period since.
The claim that a military government built a civilian party as a counterweight is the sort of thing that is often asserted and rarely evidenced. Here it is unusually well supported.
The mechanisms were public policy: privatisation of nationalised industries back to business families, local-government elections in 1979 that created a new tier of politicians outside the old landed structure, and the appointment of provincial ministers from that new group.
Be careful with the strong version of the claim, though. That a government created the conditions for a political class to rise is documented. That it intended the specific outcome — a party that would later fight the army repeatedly — is not, and the later conflict is evidence against it.
The pattern since has been a repeating cycle: a Punjab-based civilian government, growing friction with the military, removal by coup or by court, and return. It has run three or four times depending on how you count.
7.3 — Devolution#
The 18th Amendment to Pakistan's constitution, passed in 2010, was the most significant redistribution of power to the provinces in the country's history. It abolished a list of subjects reserved to the centre, moved education, health and much else to provincial control, and increased the provincial share of federal revenue.
18th Amendment: a 2010 constitutional change devolving substantial powers and money from Pakistan's federal government to its four provinces.
It is the practical test named in Chapter Three's Argument box. If the complaint about Punjabi dominance is really about federal centralisation, devolution should reduce it. If it is about who runs the army and the security state — which the amendment did not touch — devolution will not.
The evidence so far cuts both ways. Provincial governments do now control budgets and services that were previously federal, and Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have used that. But the amendment has been under continuous pressure from federal governments and from the military, and the institutions the smaller provinces complain about most were left where they were.
7.4 — Punjab's own south#
The province that other provinces call dominant contains a dominance argument of its own.
Southern Punjab — the Seraiki-speaking districts around Multan, Bahawalpur and Dera Ghazi Khan — is markedly poorer than the north and centre. It has lower literacy, worse health indicators, and less industry. Bahawalpur was a separate princely state until 1955, and there is a movement to restore it as a province.
The case made in the south is the same case, one level down, that Sindh makes against Islamabad: the money, the offices and the attention concentrate at the centre, and the centre here is Lahore.
Punjab has more people than most countries. A province of that size cannot be administered responsively from one city several hundred kilometres away, and the development figures show it is not being. Every party in Pakistan has promised a southern province at some point, which suggests the case is accepted even by those who do not act on it. Smaller provinces would also reduce the structural imbalance the whole federation complains about, since Punjab's weight is the root of it.
Opponents argue the demand is a vehicle for a small group of southern landed politicians seeking their own ministries rather than a popular movement, and note how reliably it appears before elections and vanishes after. They dispute that Seraiki is a separate language, arguing that a province built on a contested linguistic claim invites the same demand in every other district. And they point out that dividing Punjab does not obviously help Sindh or Balochistan — it changes the number of provinces, not who runs the army.
What would settle it: a serious attempt at either remedy — a province, or a genuine southern development programme with money attached. Neither has been tried, which is itself informative.
Why people care so much: because if Punjab's own south can be neglected by Lahore, then "Punjabi dominance" is not really about Punjabis. It is about who holds a capital. That reading is uncomfortable for everybody in the argument.
Punjab holds more than half the National Assembly. No party has formed a national government without winning Punjab, and much of Pakistani political behaviour follows from that one fact.
Zia's government built up an urban Punjabi business class as a counterweight to the old landed families. The party that came out of it has governed Punjab for most of the time since, and has repeatedly fought the institution that created the opening.
The 18th Amendment of 2010 devolved real power and money to the provinces — but left the army and the security state untouched, which is what the smaller provinces complain about.
Punjab has its own neglected south. If Lahore can neglect Multan, then the complaint about Punjabi dominance may really be a complaint about capitals.
8The Leaving
Punjabis have been leaving for over a century. Each wave left for a different reason, and the reason shaped what the community abroad became.
8.1 — The first wave, and the wall#
Part 12 opened with Punjabis on the west coast of North America before the First World War — mill hands in British Columbia, farm labour in California, the men who founded the Ghadar Party.
That wave was stopped deliberately. Canada's continuous-journey rule produced the Komagata Maru. The United States passed a barred-zone immigration act in 1917, and in 1923 its Supreme Court held that Indians were not legally white and could therefore be denied citizenship — a ruling that stripped naturalisation from men who already had it. Australia's immigration policy from 1901 excluded non-Europeans outright.
One consequence is a piece of history most people have never heard of. Punjabi men in California's Imperial Valley could not bring wives from India and could not marry white women under the anti-miscegenation laws of the time.
Many married Mexican women, who were legally classifiable in a way that permitted it. The result was several hundred Punjabi-Mexican families, with children named things like Maria Singh, farming in southern California.
That community exists because of the precise shape of three separate racist laws. It is the clearest illustration you will find of how migration is formed by what the destination forbids, not only by what the origin lacks.
8.2 — Britain#
The large movement began after 1947 and accelerated through the 1950s and 1960s, into a Britain short of industrial labour and still granting the right of entry to Commonwealth citizens.
Punjabis from both sides of the new border went. Sikhs and Hindus from Indian Punjab concentrated in Southall, in the West Midlands and in parts of the north. Muslims from Pakistani Punjab concentrated in the textile towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire and in Birmingham.
Two specific pushes matter, and both have been mentioned earlier in this book.
The first is partition itself: families displaced in 1947, having already lost one home, were more willing to move again.
The second is Mangla. As Chapter Five noted, the dam built under the Indus Waters Treaty flooded a large area of the Mirpur district in Pakistani-administered Kashmir, displacing something in the order of a hundred thousand people. Compensation and work vouchers were arranged, and a very large share of Britain's Pakistani population traces to that one displacement.
Migration chains are visible in an unusual way: they show up as extreme geographic concentration at both ends.
A large proportion of British Pakistanis trace to a small number of districts in and around Mirpur. A large proportion of British Sikhs trace to the Doaba region — Jalandhar, Hoshiarpur, Kapurthala, Nawanshahr — rather than to Punjab generally.
That is not what you would see if people were leaving a country. It is what you see when the first arrivals sponsor relatives, who sponsor relatives. Migration runs along family lines, not national ones — which is why entire villages in Doaba have their remittance economy in one British postcode.
8.3 — Canada, the United States, Australia#
The barriers came down in a cluster. Canada moved to a points system in the 1960s. The United States replaced its national-origins quotas in 1965. Australia dismantled its exclusion policy through the 1960s and formally ended it in the early 1970s.
The result is that most of the Punjabi presence in these countries is not a continuation of the Ghadar-era community. It is a second beginning, after a gap of forty years.
Canada now has one of the largest Punjabi populations outside South Asia, concentrated in British Columbia and around Toronto. Punjabi is among the most widely spoken languages in the country, and Punjabi Canadians are heavily represented in federal politics.
The United States has a Sikh farming community in California's Central Valley dating to the earliest wave, and much larger professional migration since 1965.
Australia has seen the fastest recent growth of any of them, driven mainly by students and skilled migration since the 2000s. Punjabi has been among the fastest-growing languages recorded in Australian censuses.
The Gulf is different in kind and larger in number. Labour migration from Pakistani Punjab to Saudi Arabia and the Emirates from the 1970s onward involves millions of workers on temporary contracts with no path to settlement. It produces the remittances but not the communities.
Remittance: money sent home by someone working abroad.
Chain migration: the process by which one migrant sponsors relatives, who sponsor relatives, producing communities drawn from a handful of villages rather than a whole country.
8.4 — What each wave left for#
It is worth being precise about this, because "poverty" is the lazy answer and it is mostly wrong.
The Ghadar-era migrants were not the poorest Punjabis. They were men with enough capital to buy a passage, usually from landholding families in Doaba, looking to add to what they had.
The British wave was labour migration into a specific shortage, plus the Mirpur displacement.
The post-1965 waves to North America were substantially professional — doctors, engineers, academics — which is why the American Punjabi community's class profile differs so sharply from the British one.
The current wave from Indian Punjab is different again, and Part 13 described the conditions producing it: farm margins narrowing, debt rising, few jobs outside agriculture, income rank falling. It moves largely through the student-visa route, and it is expensive. A family sells or mortgages land to send a child.
Almost every discussion of emigration from Punjab today assumes it is a symptom — that people leave because things are bad, and that if things improved they would stay.
The evidence in this chapter does not fit that cleanly. Punjab was the richest state in India during the decades when emigration to Britain and Canada was building fastest. The families who leave now are mostly not the poorest; they are the ones who can raise the fee. Leaving requires capital, so it correlates with having some.
What emigration from Punjab actually tracks is not poverty but the gap between expectation and local opportunity. That gap is widest for people who are educated, have some assets and can see no path locally — which is exactly who leaves.
This matters for policy, because the two readings give opposite advice. If emigration is a poverty symptom, raising incomes reduces it. If it is an expectations gap, raising incomes and education without creating matching local opportunity increases it — which is roughly what happened in Punjab for forty years.
The first wave, before 1914, was deliberately stopped — by Canada's continuous-journey rule, a US barred zone and a 1923 ruling that Indians were not legally white, and by Australian exclusion. The Punjabi-Mexican families of California exist because of the exact shape of those laws.
The British wave was post-war labour migration plus one specific displacement: Mangla Dam, built under the Indus Waters Treaty, which is why so much of British Pakistani Britain traces to Mirpur.
Migration runs along family chains, not national ones. That is why British Sikhs come overwhelmingly from Doaba and not from Punjab generally.
Emigration from Punjab has never tracked poverty. It tracks the gap between what people expect and what is available at home — which is why it rose while Punjab was India's richest state.
9Punjab Abroad
A diaspora is not a copy of a homeland kept somewhere else. It becomes its own thing, and then sends that thing back.
9.1 — Money#
The most measurable effect of the diaspora is cash. India is the world's largest recipient of remittances; Pakistan receives a very large sum relative to the size of its economy, and for years remittances have exceeded its export earnings.
In Pakistan, money sent home by workers abroad has repeatedly been worth more than everything the country sells overseas. The Gulf labour migration described in Chapter Eight is the largest single source.
At the village level in Doaba, in Indian Punjab, the effect is visible from the road: large houses, many of them locked and empty, built with money from Britain or Canada by families who no longer live there.
Those houses are a good symbol of what remittances do and do not do. They raise consumption, they pay for weddings, land and education, and they very rarely build a business. Money arriving as a gift behaves differently from money arriving as investment.
9.2 — Institutions#
Wherever Punjabis have settled in numbers, the same institutions appear: a gurdwara or a mosque, then a community association, then a language class, then a newspaper or radio station, then a political organisation.
The gurdwara abroad has taken on a broader role than at home. It runs the langar, but it also functions as a welfare office, an employment exchange, a legal-advice service and a meeting hall.
Part 12 described how control of gurdwaras and their money became the machine of Sikh politics in Punjab after 1925. The same mechanism operates abroad. Gurdwara committee elections in Southall, Surrey or Brampton are contested seriously, because whoever holds the committee holds a budget, a building and a platform.
9.3 — Politics at a distance#
This is the part I said in the front matter I would flag, so here is the flag. I am Indian. On this subject an Indian writer has a default position available, and I am going to try not to take it.
Part 13 covered the 1980s in Indian Punjab: the Anandpur Sahib Resolution, June 1984, November 1984, a decade of militancy and counter-insurgency, and the fact that almost none of it has been settled by any court, commission or count.
Those events landed differently abroad. In Punjab, the 1990s brought exhaustion and then a return to ordinary politics. In the diaspora there was no exhaustion, because there had been no daily violence to be exhausted by — and there were no consequences for continuing to talk about it.
So the argument that ended in Punjab did not end in Vancouver, Southall or Yuba City. It continued, in a form shaped by three things: the memory of 1984 as an unpunished crime, the absence of any Indian legal reckoning to point at, and the safety of a country where saying so was legal.
Two hard facts have to sit next to each other here.
The first is that diaspora money and organisation supported armed groups in Punjab during the militancy, and that the deadliest act of terrorism in Canadian history — the bombing of an Air India flight in 1985, which killed 329 people, most of them Canadians — was planned in Canada by Sikh militants. Only one person was ever convicted, and the failure of that prosecution is a live grievance in Canada.
The second is that the Indian state's own conduct in Punjab in that decade included mass disappearances that its own investigators partly confirmed, and that almost nobody has been prosecuted for those either.
Both of those are true. Neither cancels the other, and any account that mentions only one of them is doing politics rather than history.
Referendum campaigns organised among Sikh diaspora communities in several countries, and the diplomatic crisis between India and Canada that followed allegations about the killing of a Canadian citizen in 2023, have made this a live dispute between governments, not only between commentators.
These campaigns are the residue of a violent separatist movement that was defeated in Punjab and has no support there — which the last several state elections demonstrate. They are sustained by a small number of organisations abroad, some with a documented history of violence, operating freely because host countries treat the matter as free expression. India argues that a country that would not tolerate such organising against itself should not tolerate it against a partner.
Campaigners argue that a non-binding referendum is speech, not violence, and that the correct response to a political demand is to defeat it politically rather than to have it suppressed abroad. They point to the absence of accountability for 1984 and for the disappearances as the reason the grievance persists, and argue that pressure on foreign governments to silence them is itself evidence of the character they are describing.
Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia have generally held that advocating for a political outcome, including secession, is lawful speech, while violence, intimidation and foreign interference are not — and have found themselves criticised by all sides for where they draw that line.
What is not in dispute: that support for separation in Punjab itself is very low, that the grievance about 1984 has never been legally resolved, and that a referendum held among people who do not live in the territory has no legal effect anywhere.
Why people care so much: because for India it is a question of sovereignty and of a defeated insurgency being kept alive from outside; and for many diaspora Sikhs it is a question of whether a community may talk about what happened to it. Those two framings do not meet.
Almost everyone arguing about diaspora politics — in every direction — assumes that the diaspora is a version of the homeland: an extension of it, speaking for it, or betraying it.
The evidence does not support that. A diaspora community is a separate society with its own history. British Sikhs went through the 1970s and 1980s in Britain — through racism, through Southall, through their own generational fights — not in Punjab. Their politics was formed by those events as much as by 1984.
Once you drop the assumption, two puzzles dissolve. Why is separatism stronger abroad than at home? Because it is not the same movement in two places; it is one movement in Punjab that ended, and a different movement abroad, built on memory and grievance, that did not. And why does the homeland find it so annoying? Because a group claiming to speak for you, whose costs you would bear and whose decisions you do not make, is annoying in every context.
This cuts against diaspora claims to represent Punjab. It also cuts against the Indian habit of treating diaspora Sikhs as Punjabis who have gone wrong, rather than as Canadians and Britons with their own politics.
9.4 — The second and third generation#
The children and grandchildren of migrants are the largest part of the diaspora now, and they are not migrants.
They mostly do not read Punjabi in either script. Many speak it only at home and imperfectly. Their politics is largely the politics of the country they live in.
What they have kept is uneven and interesting. Food, weddings and music have travelled best — bhangra was rebuilt in Britain in the 1980s into something that then travelled back to Punjab and changed the music there. Religion has held better than language. Caste has survived remarkably well, including separate gurdwaras abroad along the lines Part 13 described in Punjab's villages.
Diaspora language retention is measurable, because several destination countries ask about home language in their censuses.
The pattern is consistent across Britain, Canada and Australia and matches what is found for other migrant languages: strong retention in the first generation, partial in the second, and sharp decline in the third unless there is institutional support — schooling, media, or a religious requirement to read the language.
Punjabi has one unusual advantage: the Sikh scripture is in Punjabi and is read liturgically, which supports Gurmukhi literacy abroad in a way that has no equivalent for Pakistani Punjabi families, whose religious language is Arabic and whose national language is Urdu.
The result is odd and worth stating. Written Punjabi may survive better in Birmingham than in Lahore.
Remittances are the most measurable effect — in Pakistan repeatedly worth more than all exports. They raise consumption and rarely build businesses.
The gurdwara abroad does more than the gurdwara at home: welfare, jobs, legal advice, a hall. Which is why committee elections are fought hard — the machine described in Part 12 operates in Southall and Surrey too.
The 1980s argument ended in Punjab and did not end abroad, because abroad there was no exhaustion and no cost. Diaspora money supported armed groups; the 1985 Air India bombing killed 329 people and was planned in Canada; and India's own conduct in Punjab has gone equally unprosecuted. All three are true.
A diaspora is not a version of the homeland. It is a separate society with its own history — which is why separatism is stronger abroad than at home, and why the homeland finds it so irritating.
10An Honest List of What We Do Not Know
The last of these lists. Two columns, as always — and then a third thought about the series itself.
10.1 — Genuinely unknown#
How many people died in East Pakistan in 1971. Pakistan's own commission said around 26,000. Bangladesh's official figure is three million. Independent scholars mostly fall between and closer to the lower end of the upper range. No count was attempted at the time, and both states now have positions they cannot revise.
How much of Lahore's commercial wealth traces to 1947 evacuee allotments. The fraud was documented at the time. The tracing has never been done, and the families are still prominent.
The true composition of the Pakistan Army today. Historical figures for Punjabi predominance are widely cited but rest on old data. The army does not publish a provincial breakdown, so current claims in either direction are estimates.
Whether Seraiki is a separate language. Linguists differ, and the question has no purely linguistic answer, because the criteria for language versus dialect are themselves disputed. What is certain is that the answer is being decided politically.
How much groundwater is left in the Indus basin. The direction is certain on both sides of the border. The remaining volume is not mapped in enough detail in either country.
The size of the Punjabi diaspora. Nobody counts Punjabis as such. Destination censuses record country of birth, or ethnicity, or language, and each gives a different figure. Estimates in the range of several million are common and none of them is a count.
What Punjabi language retention will look like in the fourth generation abroad. Too early. The third generation is only now becoming adult in Britain and Canada.
10.2 — Solid#
The demographic imbalance that shaped Pakistan's first two decades. East Bengal held the majority. Parity and One Unit were responses to it. All documented in the constitutional record.
That the Awami League won a national majority in 1970 and was not seated. Election results and the postponement are matters of public record.
The federal quota shares. Published policy: 50 per cent Punjab, 19 Sindh, about 11.5 Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 6 Balochistan, plus smaller allocations and an open-merit share.
Language shares in Pakistan. Census returns consistently put Punjabi first at around 38 per cent and Urdu well under a tenth, with Punjabi absent as a medium of instruction.
The replacement works built under the Indus Waters Treaty. Mangla, Tarbela and the link canals, with dates and the Mirpur displacement, are fully documented.
Waterlogging and salinity in Pakistani Punjab. Measured, mapped and the subject of state drainage programmes since the 1960s.
The migration chains. Doaba to Britain, Mirpur to the Yorkshire and Midlands towns. Visible at both ends in census geography.
The legal barriers of the first wave. The continuous-journey rule, the 1917 barred zone, the 1923 US ruling and Australian exclusion are all statute and case law.
That the Air India bombing of 1985 killed 329 people and was planned in Canada. Established in court, and the subject of a Canadian public inquiry.
That support for separation within Indian Punjab is very low. Repeated state elections, on high turnout, with no separatist party of consequence.
10.3 — And one about this series#
Fourteen parts of this book have assumed something I have never argued for: that Punjab is a thing with a continuous story, running from plate tectonics in Part 1 to a farm protest in Part 13, which can be told as one narrative.
Part 1 flagged a version of this — that talking about "Punjab being invaded" treats a region as though it were a person who was there the whole time. I raised it and then wrote thirteen more parts as if it were fine.
It is not obviously fine. The Punjab of the Harappans, of the Rigveda, of Ranjit Singh, of the canal colonies, and of two separate provinces in two hostile states are not the same object. They share a piece of ground and a set of rivers. Almost nothing else runs all the way through — not language, not religion, not population, not borders, not economy.
So why does the story feel continuous? Partly because rivers really do persist and really do shape what can be done on the land. Partly because each generation inherits what the last one built. And partly — this is the uncomfortable part — because I chose to write it as one story, and a narrative shape imposed on the material will always find material to fit it.
I do not think that makes the series wrong. I think it makes it a choice, and you should know it was made. The alternative history — fourteen parts arguing that Punjab is a convenient label for unrelated things that happened in the same place — would also have been defensible, and would have been much harder to read.
The Afterword takes this up properly, because it turns out to be the same question as the one the series has been walking towards.
The largest gaps here are the familiar kind: counts of the dead in 1971, the composition of an army that publishes nothing, and the size of a diaspora nobody counts as such.
What is solid is the same category as in every other part: structure. Constitutions, quotas, census returns, dams, statutes and court judgments. Institutions leave records.
And one assumption this series has been running on for fourteen parts: that Punjab is one continuous thing. It is a choice, not a finding — and now you know it was made.
Is There Still One Punjab?
The question this series has been walking towards for fourteen parts. I owe you an answer, and it is not a tidy one.
Here is the case that there is not.
The two Punjabs have been separate for nearly eighty years, which is longer than most of the political arrangements this series has covered lasted. They use different scripts and cannot read each other. They belong to states that have fought four wars. Their farmers have opposite water problems. One is majority Muslim and one is majority Sikh, and each has a minority the other does not. Their capitals face away from each other. A Punjabi in Lahore and a Punjabi in Ludhiana are more likely to have visited London than each other's city.
Add the diaspora and it gets worse for continuity. A third-generation Punjabi in Brampton or Bradford may not speak the language, has never seen the rivers, and holds a politics formed by Canadian or British events.
Now the case that there is.
The rivers are still there and still decide what can be grown. Both Punjabs grow the same thirstiest-possible crops and are ruining their land in complementary ways, under different governments who agree on nothing. Both are agricultural heartlands whose national governments depend on them for food and treat them accordingly. Both send their young people abroad in numbers, and to the same cities. The songs travel. The food travels. Bhangra was rebuilt in Britain and went back to both Punjabs.
And the biggest one: they share everything up to 1947, which is thirteen of the fourteen parts of this book.
The question "is there still one Punjab?" assumes that the answer is a fact about the world waiting to be discovered — that if you gathered enough evidence about language, religion, borders and crops you could settle it.
I do not think that is what kind of question it is. Every candidate criterion gives a different answer. By language, mostly yes. By script, no. By state, no. By river basin, yes. By religion, no. By diet and music, largely yes. By political community, definitively no.
So the honest position is that "one Punjab" is not a discovery but a decision about which criterion matters — and people choose the criterion that gives them the answer they need. Nationalists on both sides choose the state. Language activists choose the language. The people who want a shared past choose the rivers.
This is the last hidden assumption in fourteen parts, and it is the one that has been underneath the whole series. I have named it rather than resolved it, because resolving it would require me to pick a criterion, and picking a criterion is the thing I promised in Part 1 that I would not do for you.
What I will say is smaller and I think defensible.
There is one Punjab in the sense that the same ground, the same rivers and the same inherited habits keep producing recognisably similar problems on both sides of a hostile border — and that neither state has solved them, in exactly parallel ways, for exactly parallel reasons.
There is not one Punjab in any sense that gives anybody the right to speak for the whole of it. Not Lahore, not Chandigarh, not a referendum in Surrey, and not this book.
The rivers were here before all of it. Part 1 started with them, and they are the only thing in this entire series that has been present in every part. That is not a mystical claim. It is a drainage basin. But it is the one continuous thing there is, and if you want a definition of Punjab that survives fourteen parts, it is the only one I can offer you honestly.
Thank you for reading. If you have got this far, you have read something close to a quarter of a million words about a piece of ground, and you now know more about it than most people who live on it. Do something useful with that — starting with being sceptical of the next person who tells you confidently what Punjab is.
End of Part 14 of 14 — the series is complete
The Living Archive · Lovepreet Singh · misterlove.in
Sources & further reading — Part 14
Timeline
The western half, and the leaving, in the order they happened.
| When | What |
|---|---|
| 1901 | Australia's immigration policy excludes non-Europeans. |
| 1908–14 | Canada's continuous-journey rule; the Komagata Maru turned away (Part 12). |
| 1917, 1923 | The US barred zone; the Supreme Court rules Indians are not legally white and may be denied citizenship. |
| 1947 | Lahore loses almost its entire Hindu and Sikh population. Refugees arrive from east Punjab. |
| 1948–50s | Evacuee property allotment in West Punjab; documented large-scale fraud. |
| 1952 | The Bengali language movement in Dhaka, after the attempt to impose Urdu. |
| 1955 | One Unit: the four western provinces merged into "West Pakistan", capital Lahore. |
| 1950s–60s | Labour migration to Britain. Southall, the West Midlands, the Yorkshire and Lancashire towns. |
| 1960 | Indus Waters Treaty. Pakistan gets the western rivers and funding for replacement works. |
| 1965–67 | US immigration reform; Canadian points system. Mangla Dam completed, displacing much of Mirpur. |
| 1966–70 | High-yielding wheat spreads through Pakistani Punjab. |
| 1970 | One Unit dissolved; parity abandoned. The Awami League wins a national majority and is not seated. |
| 1971 | The army operation, the war, and the creation of Bangladesh in December. |
| 1972–74 | Hamoodur Rahman Commission reports. Not published for around three decades. |
| 1973 | Australia formally ends its exclusion policy. |
| 1976 | Tarbela Dam completed. |
| 1977–88 | Zia-ul-Haq. Islamisation, and the rise of an urban Punjabi business class in politics. |
| 1970s onward | Gulf labour migration from Pakistani Punjab. Remittances begin to exceed export earnings. |
| 1984 | June and November in India (Part 13). The diaspora's politics changes permanently. |
| 1985 | The Air India bombing kills 329 people. Planned in Canada. |
| 1990s | Militancy ends in Punjab. It does not end abroad. |
| 2000s | Rapid growth of Punjabi migration to Australia, largely through study routes. |
| 2010 | The 18th Amendment devolves substantial power and revenue to Pakistan's provinces. |
| 2020s | Punjabi among the fastest-growing languages recorded in Australia and among the most spoken in Canada. |
| 2023 | A diplomatic crisis between India and Canada over allegations concerning a killing on Canadian soil. |
| Now | Roughly 128 million Punjabis in Pakistan, 30 million in India, several million elsewhere. |
| The end | This is where the series stops. Not where the story does. |
Glossary
Every hard word used in this part, in plain English.
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| 18th Amendment | Pakistan's 2010 constitutional change devolving substantial powers and revenue to the provinces. It did not touch the army. |
| Chain migration | Migrants sponsoring relatives, who sponsor relatives — producing communities drawn from a few villages rather than a whole country. |
| Evacuee property | Property left behind by those who fled in 1947, vested in a state custodian and allotted against the claims of arrivals. |
| Gurmukhi | The script used for Punjabi in India, and the script of the Guru Granth Sahib. |
| Muhajir | Migrant. In Pakistan, those who came from India in 1947. In Punjab they were absorbed; in Sindh they became a distinct community. |
| One Unit | The 1955 merger of Punjab, Sindh, the North-West Frontier Province and Balochistan into a single province, "West Pakistan". Undone in 1970. |
| Parity | The rule giving East and West Pakistan equal representation despite unequal populations. It turned a Bengali majority into a tie. |
| Potohar | The dry plateau of northern Punjab — Rawalpindi, Jhelum, Chakwal, Attock — historically the heaviest army recruiting ground. |
| Remittance | Money sent home by someone working abroad. |
| Salinity | Salt left behind when irrigation water sitting near the surface evaporates. Eventually the field stops growing anything. |
| Seraiki | The language or dialect of southern Punjab, around Multan and Bahawalpur. Whether it is separate from Punjabi is disputed, and the dispute is political. |
| Shahmukhi | The Perso-Arabic script used to write Punjabi in Pakistan. Bulleh Shah and Waris Shah were written in it. |
| Waterlogging | When irrigation raises the water table into the root zone and the plants drown. The opposite failure to Indian Punjab's. |