Sargodha & Kirana Hills over the decades

THE Sargodha airbase and Kirana Hills in Pakistan have been in the news following the launch of Operation Sindoor. I spent some time in that area during my childhood.

My grandfather was allotted 50 acres in the Sargodha Canal Colony, Chak 85N, in 1902. He moved his family on a bullock cart from the ancestral village of Kapura on the Narowal-Zafarwal road. It took nearly four weeks to reach Chak 85N via Hafizabad and Pindi Bhatian.

Cultivating the land, which was bordered by thorny bushes, was not an easy task. The land touched the boundary of the old Remount Depot and now the Sargodha Cantonment. Chak 85N is now almost a suburb of Sargodha, thanks to a bypass.

Sargodha city came up side by side. Like Chandigarh, its design was based on the grid system. Chandigarh is divided into numbered sectors, while Sargodha had numbered blocks.

The Tiwanas were the richest farmers in the area. Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan Tiwana and his son Khizr Hayat floated the Unionist Party and were against the partition of the country as well as Punjab. In the 1946 elections, Khizr Hayat was unanimously elected the head of the coalition government in Punjab, supported by the Congress and the Akalis. But the Muslim League incited communal disturbances and the British Governor had to take over the reins of Punjab.

Pakistanis proudly call this area ‘California’ of their country. However, they need to remember that it was due to the hard work and enterprise of mostly those who migrated in 1947 that this barren place underwent a sea change.

About 3-4 miles from the city was a concrete runway, which is now the Sargodha airbase. The British constructed a chain of such runways across Punjab, including one at Pasrur, near Sialkot. I cycled on the runway twice on the way to Khalsa High School, Sargodha. My father studied in the same school and later graduated from Agriculture College, Lyallpur, in 1923 (Lyallpur was later renamed Faisalabad).

Kirana Hills are spread over about 10 miles. In 1946, as a Class-IX student at Government Central Model High School, Lahore, I visited my uncle’s village, located about 2 km from the hills. Along with others, I climbed to the top of the about 1,000-ft-high Kirana Pahari and found an akhara of jogis/yogis. They wore brownish dhotis and sported thick plastic rings in their ears. It seemed that Kirana Hills was their old abode (the place reminds me of a popular Punjabi folk song, “Jogi uttar paharon aaya…”)

Indian Air Force pilots used Kirana Hills as the final navigation check point before releasing bombs on the Sargodha airfield during the 1965 and 1971 wars. Today, it is well known as a mountainous nuclear storage site. However, missile and bomb technology has grown by leaps and bounds, and Kirana Hills may no longer be a safe shelter for Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.