Conclusion

Lahore, late November 2010. I am surrounded by a deafening silence. I cannot hear a sound, not even the loud noise of the traffic. I look around: there is a tiny mosque on my right and, down there, low in the sky, the railway. A mild breeze stirs the leaves of a couple of trees. Shrubs replace the hundreds of graves that, back in 1947, drew a line between this refugee camp and the city. Indeed, history appears to have stopped short of here, the former Walton Road reception camp. The yet-to-be-completed reinforced-concrete structure of part of the well-known Bab-e-Pakistan makes this barren land into a peculiar free-trade zone. Here, the past does not square its accounts with the present, and vice versa. The conversations that refugees held in these premises and the nearby suburbs still echo in the everyday communication of present-day Pakistanis. Twitter and Facebook turn into a virtual Walton Road Camp, wherein the clock of history has stopped and the betrayed dimension of achievement of independence fully surfaces. ¹ When, back in April 2010, the then President of Pakistan Asif Ali Zardari attacked his PML(N) opponents, the Sharif brothers by labelling them as “migrants”, he did not hit out blindly. As the reactions of my interlocutor suggest, he reopened a decades-old wound that both institutionally and personally had never really healed. At various times over the previous 30 years, Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, Nawaz and Shahbaz Sharif and Pervez Musharraf – all hailing from a refugee background – had either supported or laid down their own ‘foundation stone’ of this memorial to Partition refugees. This (at time of writing) unfinished monument mirrors the very same ‘broken narrative’ that has trapped the story in and around the post-1947 rehabilitation of the migrant community in West Punjab. This is precisely what this book has attempted to address and re-evaluate.