Hayat Khan Baloch stood by his friend and Ramesh Singh Arora’s grandfather, Gopal Singh Arora, when partition triggered genocidal violence in Punjab, ensuring they continued to live like brothers in Pakistan’s Lyallpur (now Faisalabad) with their religious identity and dignity intact
By Sameer Arshad Khatlani
It was a tough, potentially fatal choice of swimming against the tide that a handful made. The choice of staying back for people who suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of the India-Pakistan divide in Punjab in 1947. The gamble paid off for a few, often at the expense of losing their identity. They invariably blended into the scenery and took the religious identities of the dominant groups they suddenly found themselves surrounded by. It was all doom and gloom, though with its share of good people.
Hayat Khan Baloch was among the few good, virtuous men in a sea of murderous mobs overrunning Punjab. He stood by his friend, Gopal Singh Arora, to ensure he lived in Pakistan’s Lyallpur (now Faisalabad), the only place he had known as home, with his religious identity and dignity intact.
The Aroras—like millions across Punjab—had packed up whatever they could to escape the marauding mobs on the loose. They had suddenly found themselves stuck in the middle of what had turned into a hostile territory. The family raced against time, trying to get to the safer side of the divide over 200 km away, when Arora, the family patriarch, realized that Baloch was not around.
The clock was ticking on the family’s escape to the nearest Indian town: Amritsar. Gopal risked procrastination; he wanted to have one last meeting with his close friend, Baloch, who was visiting some relatives. The two had grown up like brothers in the same village near Lyallpur, untouched by the bigotry that was tearing apart urban Punjab. They ate the same food and spoke the same language.
Arora never expected the turn of events that spun their lives upside down in 1947. Reports of widespread massacres of Muslims trying to cross over to Pakistan from India panicked the family. They could not make sense of Arora’s insistence on seeing Baloch and risking their lives. His brothers had had enough of his sentimentalism. They left him behind before it was too late.
Baloch returned to find Arora’s family all set to leave. He pleaded with Arora. It was not safe to go. There was mayhem all around, he implored. Mobs virtually ruled Punjab. The colonial government had hurriedly divided the province and was looking for a speedy exit. The successor states of India and Pakistan were neither ready nor equipped to deal with the scale of violence that followed.
Mobs waylaid desperate refugees fleeing for their lives with impunity. Trainloads of corpses were being sent from either side of the newly created border, fuelling more anger and cycles of killings and reprisals.
Yet Baloch insisted he would not leave Arora and his family alone at the mercy of mobs in such a situation. Arora reasoned his entire extended family had left and it would be difficult for him to stay back even if he wished to.
Baloch put his foot down. He gave Gopal two options when he appeared adamant about leaving. Baloch asked him to take him along or cut his head before leaving. He did not want to live with the guilt of having left his friend alone when he needed him the most. Arora gave in to Baloch’s entreaties, unsure of what lay ahead. He chose to stay
back. The decision would have amounted to hara-kiri had it not been for Baloch.
Western Punjab had virtually been emptied of Hindus and Sikhs and the eastern side of Muslims. Hindus and Sikhs accounted for Lyallpur city’s 49% population in 1941. Almost all of them left. A similar stream of Muslim refugees from East Punjab poured into Lyallpur, fleeing violence on the opposite side. By 1951, they accounted for 69% of the city’s population.
Kapurthala in the east had a60% Muslim population before the Partition. A fraction of the Muslims—mostly recent migrants from other parts of India—now live there. The Moorish Mosque Kapurthala ruler Jagatjit Singh built in 1930 as a symbol of his tolerance towards his majority Muslim subjects, retains its grandeur but remains largely deserted.
Arora’s family could have ended up as an addition to the statistics that most Partition victims have been reduced to. He chose to swim against the tide of bigotry. Not many had the courage, luxury, or friends like Baloch to do the same. Baloch did what any human ought to have done, but most did not or could not. Collective madness in Punjab got the better of even regular people.
Baloch’s story—extraordinary because of this backdrop—would have remained untold had Arora’s grandson, Ramesh Singh Arora, not made history by becoming the first Sikh lawmaker in Pakistan’s Punjab province in 2013. Ramesh Singh Arora went on to become the first Sikh minister in the province in March 2024.
In 2013, Ramesh Singh Arora’s nomination to the Punjab assembly hit headlines in Pakistan and India. This was the kind of offbeat story I was looking for. The Indian press so far had had the bare bones of his story. I wanted to flesh it out during my stay on a journalistic assignment in Lahore in December 2013. I had arranged Ramesh Singh Arora’s number among several others to set up meetings for my similar unusual articles from Lahore. Most of them were either out of town or had other commitments.
Logistics frustrated some meetings. I had been a bit cut up, dialling numbers for appointments for about an hour without much success, when by sheer coincidence, Ramesh Singh Arora happened to be not just in Lahore, but also near Davis Road, not very far from my hotel, when I called him. He was returning to Islamabad, where he ran an NGO, after attending a lunch hosted for the then-Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Had I called half an hour later, he would have hit the high-speed motorway to the Pakistani capital, making it impossible for him to take a U-turn. Ramesh Singh Arora had to barely drive back a few hundred metres to the hotel. He was kind enough to agree to meet me when I told him I had come from India and wanted to interview him.
An imposing figure, over 6 feet tall, Ramesh Singh Arora stood out with his neatly tied yellow turban, blue shirt and suit, and flowing salt and pepper beard. I recognized him instantly as he stepped out of his Honda City car.
‘Sardar Sahib, you are a celebrity,’ I told him after offering him the traditional Sikh greeting: Sat Sri Akal. ‘Welcome to Pakistan,’ he responded. We exchanged pleasantries before walking into the hotel lobby, where he told me about his family’s extraordinary story over cups of tea for the next hour.
He had anticipated the obvious question I would ask: Was it worth the risk his grandfather had taken in 1947? ‘I knew you would ask this,’ Ramesh Singh Arora began in a measured tone, smilingly telling me this is a question all Indians ask him.
‘I do not know about others, but it was worth it in our case. I stand as a vindication of my grandfather’s faith in the inherent human goodness that Hayat Khan Baloch showed,’ he said. ‘Imagine,’ he continued, ‘the faith my grandfather had in Baloch. He chose Baloch over the pleadings of his brothers to leave Pakistan as soon as possible. They thought, what nonsense. How can he do this for the sake of a Muslim? But he refused to relent, saying Baloch, too, was his brother.’
The bond offered the Aroras the emotional and moral support they needed to weather the storm. The family had little to complain about. They went about their lives, as usual, tending to their fields and dabbling in business.
Lyallpur lay at the heart of swathes of uncultivable wasteland that had been turned highly fertile through a network of canals in western Punjab since 1886. It had by 1947 become a highly productive region with surpluses of fodder, rice, wheat, gram, and cotton.
Many Hindus and Sikhs had migrated to the canal colonies from the less-developed areas of East Punjab and enriched themselves. They now found themselves back to square one as refugees. The Aroras counted their blessings. Survival was the immediate concern before the dust settled. The complete transformation of the social structure soon, however, began to dawn on them. They started to feel the void of the en masse departure of Sikhs.
There were no gurdwaras in the vicinity for them to pray in congregation. The family began to feel the need for a religious atmosphere for their children to grow up in. Nankana Sahib, around 70 km away, was their best bet. The family moved to the Mecca of Sikhism in 1965. They settled at a stone’s throw from Gurdwara Janamasthan, built at the place of birth of the Sikhism founder, Guru Nanak. Much had changed by then.
A better sense had begun prevailing in the Pakistani government, which had started renovating Sikh shrines in the city named after Nanak. Giani Pratab, a Sikh priest, made the most of the opportunity. He took it upon himself to look after the seven Sikh shrines in Nankana Sahib.
Giani Pratab opened a seminary at one of them, Gurdwara Patti Sahib, to teach Sikh children Gurmukhi, the script of their scriptures. The gurdwara is a confirmation of how religious differences are not been cast in stone. It stands at the place where Nanak’s Muslim teacher, Maulana Qutab-ud-din, taught him Arabic and Persian.
Ramesh Singh Arora was born in 1974 in Nankana Sahib. Five years earlier, Sikhs from around the world congregated there to celebrate Nanak’s 500th birth anniversary in 1969. The brutalizing memories of the Partition were fading away years after the tide of hatred had destroyed Punjab’s syncretic culture.
Nankana Sahib, the land of Nanak’s birth, bucked the trend. The descendants of Rai Bular, Nanak’s Muslim devotee, have been in the vanguard of an uninterrupted celebration there of the inter-religious synthesis the guru stood for.
