Khizar Hayat Tiwana

Malik Sir Khizar Hayat Tiwana (7 August 1900 – 20 January 1975) was a British Indian statesman, landowner and army officer of the Punjab Unionist Party who served as the last Premier of the undivided Punjab between 1942 and 1947. He opposed the partition of India and the two-nation theory, was expelled from the Muslim League in 1944, and resigned on 2 March 1947, after which the Governor ruled directly until Partition. He was the son of Sir Umar Hayat Khan Tiwana. No Arabic Wikipedia article exists for him; this account is written from the English and Urdu articles and the Wikidata item. ^{1 2 3}

He was born at Chak Muzaffarabad, in the Shahpur district of the Punjab, into the feudal Tiwana family of Shahpur, and owned some 45,000 acres of agricultural land. His father, Sir Umar Hayat Khan, was a wealthy landowner and soldier and an elected member of the Council of the Secretary of State for India. Khizar was educated at Aitchison College in Lahore, began managing the Kalra Estate at a young age, and became a renowned horse breeder with the largest stud farm in the Punjab of his time. ^{1 2}

The English article states, without a citation attached to the sentence, that unlike his father he was a religious person and is believed to be a follower of Sufism. No other consulted source names a school or order for him, and that reading is preserved in full in his data record, where the faith value stands unknown for want of a second source. ¹

At sixteen he volunteered for war service and was commissioned into the 17th Cavalry on 17 April 1918; he served briefly in the Third Anglo-Afghan War, earning a mention in dispatches, and rose through honorary ranks to honorary lieutenant-colonel in January 1943, thereafter assisting his father in managing the family estates. ¹

He was elected to the Punjab Legislative Assembly in 1937 and immediately joined Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan's cabinet as Minister of Public Works and Local Self Government, later being entrusted with the home portfolio. At the outbreak of the Second World War he was in charge of the Manpower Committee of the Punjab War Board and the Civil Defence departments, and in 1940 he handled the Unionist Party's dealings with Allama Mashriqi and the security arrangements for the Muslim League's Lahore sessions. His recorded achievements include reform of the panchayat system and improvements to infrastructure and irrigation. ¹

On Sikandar's unexpected death he was unanimously selected as his successor and took office at the turn of 1943, at the height of the Second World War. His government had to introduce rationing and fix grain prices on Delhi's instructions to feed a Bengal stricken by the famine of 1943, measures that hurt rich and poor alike and damaged the government's standing. ¹

Like Sikandar, he was staunchly opposed to the idea of Pakistan, but was less willing than his predecessor to bow to Jinnah's demands. When Jinnah in April 1944 demanded that the Unionist Party be renamed the Muslim League Coalition Party, Tiwana refused, asserting that his government was a coalition of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs rather than a Muslim League government; he was expelled from the Muslim League later that year, and the League waged an increasingly vitriolic campaign against him, denouncing him as a traitor. ¹

At the 1946 elections the Muslim League won most Muslim seats but could not form a government, so Tiwana formed a coalition with the Congress Party and the Akali Dal — the first predominantly non-Muslim government of the province — against which the League organised civil disobedience. He remained opposed to partition to the end, holding that the Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus of the Punjab shared a common culture, and as a last attempt proposed an independent Punjabi state separate from both India and Pakistan. He was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of India in the 1946 New Year Honours and was a member of the Indian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in the summer of 1946. He resigned on 2 March 1947, and the Governor assumed direct control until the day of partition. ¹

These positions are reported here as the sources record them; the museum gives no verdict on them.

He retired from politics, lived for a time in Simla and Delhi, and returned to the Kalra Estate in Pakistan in October 1949. In the 1950s the Punjab government of Mumtaz Daultana moved against his land grants and private canals. During a stay in the United States he returned to his opposition to partition, remarking that a Punjabi Muslim had more in common with a Punjabi Hindu or Sikh than with a Bengali. He died at Butte City, California, on 20 January 1975. ¹

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