Migration

Pakistan is a society on the move. Its birth was accompanied by the Partition of the
subcontinent and the division of the two Muslim majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal.
The Partition-related violence sparked the largest uprooting of people in the twentieth
century.33 While the two-way transfer of over 9 million Punjabis in the short period of
August-December 1947 forms the iconic representation of this upheaval, migration of
Muslims into Sindh continued well into the 1950s. By 1951, the Urdu-speaking UP migrants
(mohajirs) numbered around 50 per cent of Karachi’s population. As we shall see later, the
creation of a UP Urdu-speaking enclave in the sands of Sindh was to have profound
consequences for Pakistan’s politics. The cultural and political assimilation of Punjabi-
speaking migrants, unlike their Urdu counterparts in Sindh, has obscured the fact that the
greater number of migrants from India (over 5 million) came from East Punjab. They settled
on the agricultural land abandoned by the outgoing Sikh farmers in the Canal Colony areas
and in the towns and cities of West Punjab, where they frequently accounted for over 50 per
cent of the population. The Punjabi Migrants have formed a constituency for Islamist and
extremist sectarian movements as well as for the mainstream factions of the Muslim League.
They are also staunch upholders of the Kashmir cause, reflecting the fact that there was not
only a significant influx of Kashmiri refugees into Pakistan in 1947, but the experiences of
upheaval by ethnic. Punjabis led them to an anti-Indian stance. The Punjabi refugee element
in Pakistan’s politics has been overlooked, but it in fact has formed another of the longer-
term shaping factors which are not always recognized in contemporary security-driven
analyses.