ucked in the Garden Police Headquarters, Karachi, is a newly raised Police Reference Library alongside the Police Museum containing artefacts, police pictures, rare documents and reports from the 19^th Century Sindh. The museum offers a deep insight into the society, events and circumstances that influenced history during the colonial rule.

While touring the different galleries of the museum, one cannot but notice the great effort that has been made to restore the building into “what would have been the police quarters of 1896.“ The stone walls, floor tiles, ceilings, wooden staircases and mud-baked roofing material instantly transport the visitor to the mid- to late 19^th Century police office under the Raj. The work is in progress to replace the last remaining cement structures with stones to restore the original look, says former IGP Saud Ahmad Mirza, now the curator of the museum.

The project was raised literally from a shambles. “One of the abandoned barracks in advanced stages of disrepair array was assigned to us for the project. It has been largely restored,” says Mirza.

One of the galleries has various arms, weapons and ammunition ranging from daggers, bayonet and swords to muskets like old matchlocks and flintlocks and some old pistols. There is another gallery that features rare pictures of officers and men of the Sindh Police and the law enforcement force after Independence. There are also pictures of officers attending courses at an academy in Bangladesh, the erstwhile East Pakistan, where the first post-independence police academy was set up.

Alongside the mannequins donning old police uniforms is a museum label, reproducing instructions and selection criteria of the Mounted Police with the dip pens in its distinctive writing and marks on the paper. It mandated the men of the mounted force to be the owner of a horse, who could manage its fodder and a caretaker. “Like buying and getting a uniform stitched on one’s own, owning and maintaining the horse was the order of the day. It was an expensive proposition even in those days,” says Saud Mirza.

At a time when the horse-riding force was being abolished in most of India, the specific requirements of Sindh, including prosperity, topography and a large regional landscape with distant population centres, required mounted patrolling. This must be the time when neighing horses and their hoofs tapping on the few metalled roads and horse hoof dust, would have been more common than the sound of blaring horns and vehicles jamming roads.

The prosperity of the province was such that once a beggar approached police chief Captain EC Marston with the request to recover his horse, sword and other stuff from robbers. The police officer instantly obliged. The “Pugees” followed the trail of robbers 200 miles into Dadu and recovered the horse. Things don’t seem to have changed much. Even today sometimes the stolen cars end up there. The Pugees were critical to tracking criminals as they would follow their footsteps to their lairs. They were a substantial force within the police investigation systems at the time.

Next to the museum is the newly-established Reference Library that carries a rich collection of hundreds of rare police reports, pictures and analyses into the Hindu-Muslim communal issues and the rise of Hindu militancy, particularly far-right outfits such as the RSS and the Arya Samaj.

To build the Reference Library, around 200 volumes from Sindh Archives, National Documentation Centre, Islamabad, Department of Sindhology, Sindh University, Jamshoro, were reviewed, says Saud Ahmad. “Since 2011 till date, efforts are continuing to collect and scan police records from personal collections of police officers and police departments of Sindh and the Punjab. Of those approximately 28,000 pages of selected files have been printed and bound under different subject titles.”

Besides hardcore technical police matters like documents related to the raising of Sindh Police, Police Administration Reports, Establishment Schemes, Training Manuals and Re-organisation Schemes, the library also boasts Bombay Presidency Police Abstracts of Intelligence and Sindh’s Who is Who. Saud Ahmad Mirza says they contain a vast collection of documents, inquiries and incident reports about political, social and criminal incidents from 1853 to 1951 and the government’s strategies, policies and actions related to those.

“Most of this wealth of knowledge has been digitized. Sadly, we have very little record from 1955 onwards,” says Ahmad. That remains a disappointment as one cannot find anything on some major events in Pakistan. There are, however, police reports, pictures and analyses into the meetings of the Communist Party of Pakistan in the ‘50s.

“The purpose of the Reference Library is to preserve important police records since 1843. It is open to the public and students who want to carry out research work or visit for a chance to understand the past. For this the only requirement is an identity card,” says the official. “Last year some students held internships with the library also,” he says.

The library also has dozens of police documents on the Hur movement led by Pir Sayyid Sibghatullah Shah, covering the suppression of the Hurs from 1929 to 1942, giving detailed accounts of the movement and the Raj’s counterinsurgency actions against it.

There are several photographs including one of the former Pir Pagara, Sayyid Shah Mardan Shah-II and his brother after their return from England, where they were sent after the execution of their father on March 20, 1943. The records also contain police reports on the Khilafat Movement, the Khaksar Tehreek, Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement and Karachi killings of 1938-1939.

Saud says the Bombay Presidency Police Abstracts of Intelligence also show how the Special Branch tracked Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s political activities, his various meetings and comments. They have over 400 entries on the founder of Pakistan. They also reported on various meetings and protests by the Muslim League and Congress and the parliamentarians.

The library also contains several files related to the Manzilgah Case and the Manzilgah Court of Inquiry. Despite being one of the iconic chapters of Sindh’s history, little is known and understood about its role in the epoch-defining event of the Pakistan Movement. It also sheds some light on the communal issues between Hindus and Muslims who lived together for centuries.

Back in the 1930s, Sukkur was a thriving centre of trade and commerce in northern Sindh. While Muslims constituted a majority in the rest of Sindh, Hindus constituted a majority in Sukkur with approximately 40,000 Hindus, out of a total population of 70,000 in 1939.

Not allowed to ride horses and own large landholdings under the Mughals, the Hindus had prospered and educated themselves under the British Raj. Under it, they also enjoyed considerable strength in the Sindh Assembly, municipality and other local bodies and had a vibrant press at their beck and call.

Their social ascendency was also helped in rural parts by the large-scale credit-seeking Muslim landholders, with the eventual takeover of farmlands of indebted farmers unable to return the heavy debts that would multiply several times due to usury. This transformed them into owners of large landholdings but not without building resentment and unease among Muslims. Besides several other undercurrents including mosque repairs, ban on cow slaughter by the municipal committee and Hindu conversions to the Muslim faith often led to communal violence.

The Manzilgah complex, which also included a mosque, was built in 1598 by Syed Masoom Shah and remained under the use of the British government after the annexation of the province. It was situated near the Sadhubela Temple, built in the 1820s. The Hindus were strongly opposed to handing over the Manzilgah complex to the Muslim community due to its proximity to the temple.

The satyagarh (non-violent resistance) for the possession of the Manzilgah and the unfortunate bloody riots of 1939 in Sukkur blew the lid over the simmering communal tensions between people of the two faiths.

While the Muslim satyargarah was going on around the Manzilgah mosque, a Hindu Mahasabha conference in Sukkur presided by BS Moonje demanded the removal of Muslims from the mosque. Moonje was removed from Congress for his fire-breathing communal rhetoric. The Hindu muscular movement and the government’s subsequent eviction of Muslims by the police from Manzilgah sparked deadly violence in November 1939. This was followed by a series of widespread blood-curdling communal violence across several cities of Sindh, claiming the lives of members of both communities.

It had political fallout too. The government of Khan Bahadur Allah Bakhsh Soomro, which was dependent on the support of a Hindu coalition became an instant casualty.

Eventually, a British, Judge Weston, was assigned to adjudicate on the issue. After the proceedings, Weston ruled in favour of the Manzilgah mosque being a Muslim property and upheld the decision to hand it over to the Muslim community.

The documents and reports also show a picture of the muscular RSS and Arya Samaj and their activities for safeguarding their interests. It also describes how Arya Samaj was deployed in Sukkur. Later, the militant force morphed into Hindu nationalism.

Another entry in The Intelligence Abstracts under HINDU AND SIKH AFFAIRS mentions collections of donations to set up Hindu Military College in Sind: “A private meeting of Hindu Assembly members and Hindu leaders was held in Karachi on 13th February 1940. The starting of a Hindu Military College was discussed..... Donations amounting to Rs 9,000 were announced in the meeting.”

The Manzilgah movement also brought forth Sir Abdullah Haroon, GM Syed, Muhammad Ayub Khuhro, Hashim Gazdar and Pir Ali Muhammad Rashdi as frontline Muslim leaders of Sindh. The Manzilgah is considered an event that led to a tectonic shift in the dynamics of Sindh, with Muslims seeking a separate homeland. In its aftermath, GM Syed presented the famous resolution in the Sindh Assembly in March 1943, formally proclaiming that Hindus and Muslims of India were separate nations and therefore should have separate states. Sindh became the first province to have adopted such a resolution.

The contributor works for The News International