Abdul Jabbar Karim was born on June 12, 1938, in Calcutta. His father, Abdul Razaq, had been a business man alongside serving as the Ordinary Presidency Magistrate. After partition, Karim’sfamily migrated to Dhaka in East Pakistan.
Sharing his memories of the partition and its accompanying communal violence, Karim particularly mentions a phrase he attributes to the last Prime Minister of Bengal in British India, Huseyn Shaheed Suharwardi.
He recalls that while advising Muslims against snatching or robbing Hindu families, Suharwardi, who later served as the fifth Prime Minister of Pakistan, would frequently say, “Inko maro, kooto, par looto nahin” [hurt them, beat them, but don’t loot them].
Karim laments that Muslims failed to act on his advice and started looting Hindu families in their neighbourhoods. Once this loot and plunder started, the Hindusalso retaliated and started killing Muslims, he says. “Ihave witnessed riots first hand in Calcutta,” he says.
Karim says he still remembers the appalling scenes he witnessed during his train journey from Calcutta to Chiniot in what is now Pakistani Punjab. He said he could not forget the sight of a train running on a parallel track with all its passenger cabins full of corpses. “I couldn’t spot a single person alive in there,” he says.
Published in Daily Times, July 20th , 2017.
