Khizar Hayat Tiwana

Sir Malik Khizar Hayat Tiwana (1900 to 1975) was the last Unionist Party premier of undivided Punjab. He was born on 7 August 1900 at Chak Muzaffarabad in Shahpur district, now Sargodha, into a great landowning family. The Tribune says it held about 100,000 acres and kept a 1,200-strong cavalry, the Tiwana Lancers. His father was Sir Umar Hayat Khan. He became premier at the end of December 1942 (30 December in Wikipedia, 31 December in The Tribune).

His part in this history is as the head of the last government in which Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs shared power. The Akali Dal and the Congress were his partners, and the fall of his ministry removed what the historian Tahir Kamran calls the barrier to communal violence.

Key moments

• 1944: he was expelled from the Muslim League after refusing Jinnah's demand that the Unionist Party be renamed the Muslim League Coalition Party.
• 1946: the Muslim League won 75 of the 86 Muslim seats, and the Unionists only 18 seats in the 175-member Assembly. The Unionists still formed a coalition with the Congress and the Akalis, with Sikh ministers including Baldev Singh and Swaran Singh. Khizar described himself and his Unionist Muslim colleagues as a "buffer" between the League and the minority communities.
• 24 January 1947: his government banned the Muslim League National Guards and the RSS. The League answered with direct action, and he lifted the ban on processions.
• 2 March 1947: he resigned. R. K. Kaushik, writing in The Tribune in 2017, links the decision to a meeting at the home of Education Minister Ibrahim Khan Barq, where Barq's eight-year-old son refused to shake his hand because he stood in the way of Pakistan.
• 3 to 5 March 1947: Governor Evan Jenkins refused the Muslim League leader Mamdot's request to form a ministry and proclaimed Section 93 rule. On 3 March Master Tara Singh brandished a sword on the steps of the Assembly building in Lahore, which Kamran says ignited communal animosity. Rioting spread to Amritsar, and Hindus and Sikhs were killed in the Rawalpindi and Multan divisions.

After 1947 he lived in Shimla and Delhi, later on his estate in Sargodha district, Pakistan, and died in California in January 1975 (19 January in The Tribune, 20 January in Wikipedia).

Remembered for: holding Punjab together across religious lines for as long as it could be held. Kaushik describes him as secular, honest and courteous. Kamran writes that once the buffer was removed, communal frenzy broke loose.