Hazuri Bagh: Two graves and the battle for the Muslims of Punjab

Lahore’s Hazuri Bagh, an antique garden featuring a dazzling Sikh-era pavilion built from marble plundered from Mughal monuments, is a treasure for admirers of history and architecture alike. It is flanked by the towering Alamgiri gate and the magnificent Badshahi Mosque before it.

In 1938, the garden received another illustrious, permanent addition: the final resting place of Allama Muhammad Iqbal, forerunner to the Pakistan Movement, whose mortal remains were interred beneath the ground by the steps of the Badshahi Mosque. 

While it cannot be denied that his friends and admirers selected the perfect place for the visionary, few at the time, or among the millions who have visited since, are aware of the intriguing irony of this location.

For a few hundred feet from Iqbal’s mausoleum, across the footsteps of the Mosque and on the opposite corner of the gardens, lies the tomb of Iqbal’s foremost political adversary amongst the Muslims of Punjab: Sikandar Hayat Khan.

Sikander was the leader of the feudal Unionist Party that dominated the politics of Punjab and served as the province’s premier following the 1937 provincial elections in British India. 

The flourishing province was of central importance to the imperial machinery, serving as the crowning jewel to Britain’s agricultural policies while also providing a replenishing pool of loyal recruits for the military. This resulted in the province’s infrastructure rapidly developing in the form of pristine public facilities, such as colleges and hospitals. 

Muslims were narrowly in the majority over other religious communities, at around 56 percent of the population in 1931, though most lived in rural villages. As the leaders of this highly developed and opulent province would, in effect, have some degree of influence over British policies, the political direction of Punjab would be of central importance in deciding the fate of Muslims in India.

When Iqbal was elected to the Punjab legislative assembly in the late 1920s, he initially joined the Unionists but soon fell out with them after witnessing firsthand the party’s inner workings, which encouraged divisions between rural and urban Muslims to ensure the power of the landed class.

In the assembly, Iqbal spoke of the plight of the common man, proposing sweeping reforms such as reallocating agricultural land, revamping tax collection, developing public works, free healthcare for women, and compulsory elementary education—all revolutionary proposals given their time. Yet, because empowering the people would undermine the feudal class, this wholly alienated Iqbal from the Unionists.

Iqbal would strike his well-known relationship with Muhammad Ali Jinnah in 1929, famously viewing him as the leader of the destiny of India’s Muslims. In turn, Jinnah entrusted Iqbal as head of the Punjab Muslim League, from where he would personally contest the Unionists in the 1937 elections.

When the Unionists maintained their majority, Jinnah struck a pact with Sikandar in the city of Lucknow, apparently merging the Unionists and League into one party. While the move improved the League’s political standing, Iqbal directly opposed the deal before Jinnah, asserting that Sikandar was now using the pact to assume control and destroy the Muslim League in Punjab.

Illness confining him to his bedside, Iqbal engaged in battle with Sikandar for the political soul of the Muslims of Punjab.

Keeping the Unionists at bay, Iqbal conducted a mass-contact movement, dispatching League youths to rural areas to expand the party’s foothold. It would be a bitter battle, with Sikandar at one point seeking to take advantage of Iqbal’s dire finances by proposing a thinly-veiled bribe for his obedience. This only further strengthened Iqbal’s resolve to rid the province of feudal politics, seeing it as a major roadblock to his mission of awakening the Muslims.

As Iqbal approached the final months of his life, the battle raged on. Sikandar’s pact with Jinnah remained, although it was largely disregarded. He refused to acknowledge or even officially pledge himself to the League and advised party members to follow suit, and sought to control the party’s inner workings and finances. Burdened by such pressures, the League began to slip, narrowly missing extinction just days before Iqbal’s death.

Iqbal’s death in April 1938 was a sore blow to the party; the Punjab Muslim League fell immediately to the Unionists, allowing them to successfully assume control over Punjab for the following decade.

Throughout the battle for Punjab between Sikandar and Iqbal, Jinnah had taken a more leisurely route than Iqbal when it came to handling the Unionists and the Muslim League in the province in the hopes that they would ultimately join the League and disband their feudal party. Even before the pact, Iqbal had suggested instead focusing on development at the grassroots level among Muslims.

In the long run, Iqbal’s influence on Muslim politics would lead the League to victory: in 1940 it passed the “Pakistan Resolution,” adopting Iqbal’s “two-nation theory”, which formally recognised Muslims as a nation of their own. The resolution would thereafter become Jinnah’s rallying cry to unite Muslims politically.

In the 1946 general elections, the Unionists finally displayed their true colours by forging an alliance with the Indian National Congress—the party diametrically opposed to the League and the Pakistan Resolution. The Punjab Muslim League, led by admirers of Iqbal defiantly chanting his poetry in the streets and invoking the Pakistan Resolution’s sentiments of Muslim solidarity, finally awoke the rural masses and brought the League to a landslide victory, pushing the Unionists into definite oblivion. 

The League’s victory in such a key province would strengthen and legitimise its demand for Pakistan in the subsequent months of waning British control.

Sikander, opposed to social development in Punjab and an ardent ally of the British, represented that which Iqbal’s timeless poetry spoke out against. Iqbal’s nemesis to the very end, he outlived him until his death in 1942, whereupon he was buried within the confines of the Hazuri Bagh.

The mortal remains of Allama Iqbal and Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan stand today as two eternally opposing powers. 

But decades on, there emerges a clear victor of history. Iqbal’s mausoleum, sprinkled with the dust of Rumi’s tomb, draped in marble gifted by the King of Afghanistan, and under a watchful guard of honour, is a site of national heritage, visited each year by notable figures to honour his memory, and is seldom found wanting for rose petals. It is a testament to universal adoration towards Iqbal.

In stark contrast, Sikander’s tomb, draped by religious scripture and entertained only by passersby, stands as a lone relic of history.