SPEECH FOR DR AJAYPAL SINGH BANGA,  Lahore, 3 February 2026

Dr Ajay  and Mrs Ritu Banga

Distinguished guests

Uncle Babar has asked me to say a few words to introduce our family connection with the Sikh community over the centuries.

I read somewhere that your predecessor Robert McNamara once told a World Bank manager who presented him with a memo: “George, don’t bother to sit down. I can read faster than you can speak.’’

I am tempted, therefore, to give you this speech to speed-read rather than recite it to you.

We in the Punjab owe an enormous unpaid debt to the Sikh community, in particular to the patronage of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

Three of Uncle Babar’s and my ancestors – Azizuddin, Imamuddin and Nuruddin, all Muslims – enjoyed positions of trust in the Sikh Darbar of Lahore, during the reign of the canny maharaja.

He selected Fakir Azizuddin as his confidant and his foreign affairs interlocutor with the British East India Company in the east, the Afghans in the west, and the Sindhis in the south.    

He entrusted to Fakir Imamuddin the keys of his priceless toshakhana and armoury in Govindgarh Fort (outside Amritsar).

The youngest brother Fakir Nuruddin – Uncle Babar’s and my direct lineal ancestor – administered the city of Lahore. After the Maharaja’s death in 1839, Nuruddin served as a Member of the Regency Council during the minority of the juvenile Maharaja Duleep Singh.

One of Nuruddin’s sons - Qamaruddin - escorted Maharani Jindan during her exile from the Punjab in 1848. Another son – Zahuruddin -  taught Duleep Singh Persian and Arabic.

The association of the family did not end there. We have been privileged to enjoyed contact with, for example,

Dr Narinder Singh Kapany,

Dr Mohinder Singh Randhawa,

Sardar Harcharan Singh Brar,

Montek Singh Ahluwalia (who incidentally sends you both his regards)

And that quintessential Punjabi – the late Khushwant Singh - whose ashes I brought by train to Pakistan for interment at Hadali.

In 2001, in New Delhi, on the occasion of Maharaja’s bicentenary,  I quoted a Punjabi saying : Jine Lahore nay vakhiya, o jamiya nahin. PM Vajpayee who was present responded: ‘I have been to Lahore and therefore I am alive.’

You two by coming to Lahore have in a sense been reborn…

On that occasion I coined this phrase: Jine Lahore tay raj kitya, o marya nahin. Maharaja Ranjit Singh hali vi amar nay.   

The samadhi of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and his successors Kharak Singh and Nau Nehal Singh, constructed by our ancestor Fakir Nuruddin in the 1840s, lies a kilometre away from this haveli. The graves of three Fakir brothers are five hundred yards away from this haveli.  In a sense, they  are invisible witnesses to our gathering here tonight.

Both Maharaja Ranjit Singh and those from different faiths who served him – Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, and Christians – subscribed to his spirit of brotherhood, equality, enlightened secularism and of peaceful coexistence.

To Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the river Sutlej was more than a natural border. It had then, as the rivers of the Punjab do today, a political, strategic significance.

Let me conclude by thanking you for being here, and our host Syed Babar Ali. He personifies, for all of us Pakistanis, a 99 year old continuity of enlightened patronage, civic consciousness and cultural largesse.

F. S. AIJAZUDDIN