by AJMAL KAMAL
I was a class nine student then, in a private school in Hyderabad, Sindh, which was located in a satellite town, called Latifabad, demographically dominated by us refugees from Rajasthan, UP and East Punjab, with the new, post-Partition migrants from the northern parts of West Pakistan. The school was run by a group of motivated individuals who actively sympathised with the Jamaat-e-Islami. Most members of the group were Ashraaf of Rajasthan. Although big and small towns of Sindh, including Hyderabad, had become home to a large number of Rajasthanis (and Kathiawaris and other Gujaratis as well), but since they typically belonged to non-Ashraaf castes, they were under the heavy cultural domination of the UP-Punjab elites who supported the officially defined ‘Pakistan Ideology’. This dominant politics did not have much space in it for the political aspirations of the linguistic majority of the newly restored province — i.e. the Sindhis — let alone the culturally suppressed Rajasthanis and Gujaratis, who were the ethnic vote bank of the Jamaat and different avatars of the Muslim League in those days and were destined to be taken over by the MQM, when the said politics threw away the ideological garb and came out in its true, ethnic colour.
The Express Tribune for more
(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)