question_answer

Penderel Moon arrived in Bahawalpur as revenue minister in April 1947 under Prime Minister Mushtaq Ahmed Gurmani, later governor of West Pakistan and remembered by Salahuddin Abbasi as a “"lovely little roly-poly man"”. He took over from Sir Richard Crofton who had been in the post since 1942, the first of the two British Prime Ministers of Bahawalpur.

Moon commented on a "“vague hostility"” to the arrival of another British official, which he put down in part to the desire to see at last the end of the British and secondly to a tradition of "“anti-western, obscurantist and reactionary Islam"” in Bahawalpur. In the former complaint, the population must have been disappointed to get a second British Prime Minister after Independence. In the latter, such opinions may have been part of the earlier clash of the British with tradition embodied in Maulvi Ghulam Hussain. They were not overtly shared by the anglophile nawab.

However, in the years since Bahawalpur was absorbed into the Punjab, marginalised, forgotten and impoverished in the enrichment of the upper Punjab, reactionary Islam had gained ground in Bahawalpur once more. The huge support, moral and financial, given by the nawab of Bahawalpur to the Quaid-i-Azam and the new Islamic state of Pakistan at its birth had been in no wise remembered and only reciprocated in broken promises to the state.

As the most important Muslim-majority state with a Muslim ruler, leaving aside the different story and geographical location of Hyderabad, and with geographical borders with Sindh and Punjab, Bahawalpur'’s accession to Pakistan must have appeared certain.

Moon wrote, the people of the state "“knew nothing of any other possibility"”. The Muslim population was "“well content”" with the prospect and most of the minority communities accepted it without serious concern.

It was only as panic grew, and Muslims from Rajputana began to move into Bahawalpur, in the weeks leading up to the transfer of power, that their migration was mirrored by that of the Hindu population. They were, in particular, the proprietors of urban businesses, that the nawab hoped and tried to retain in Bahawalpur.

Sadiq Muhammad Khan was close enough to Jinnah, who had advised the family legally and in relation to the Sutlej Valley Project loan, to have had him as a regular guest at his house, Al Qamar, in Karachi. Eventually, he presented the Quaid with 15 acres of land and ordered that a house should be built for him on it. Jinnah also took a laissez-faire attitude to the princes, so that their expectations of at least semi-independence within Pakistan, and, in Bahawalpur'’s case, absolute belief in promises of provincial status in due course, would have more allure than any0 offer from a Congress government in India.

One of his grandfather'’s servants, deputed to look after Jinnah'’s building work in Karachi reported no such easy-going attitude in other areas of the Quaid’'s life. The servant, who was an unusually big man, six and a half feet tall, told Salahuddin that Jinnah was so imperious, he used to tremble in front of him.

In a riposte to the resolution of 14 June 1947 of the All-India Congress Committee (AICC) that suggested that the lapse of paramountcy did not lead to the independence of states as they could not exist separate from the rest of India, Jinnah had made a statement on 17 June: "‘The Indian states will be an independent sovereign states on the termination of paramountcy and they will be free to adopt any course they like. We do not wish to interfere with internal affairs of any state"”, and "“...we shall be glad to discuss with them and come to settlement which will be in the interest of both.”"

On what did Moon comment to the arrival of another British official?

A) Desire to see the end of the British

B) Tradition of reactionary and anti-western Islam

C) Both (a) and (b)

D) Neither (a) nor (b)