Lieutenant Colonel Nawab Sir Malik K.H.Tiwana

Lieutenant Colonel Nawab Sir Malik Khizar Hayat Tiwana (1900 75) came from a family which had, since the fifteenth century, been prominent among the landed aristocracy of the Punjab. His father was Major General Sir Malik Umar Hayat Khan (1875-1944) who acted as honorary aide-de-camp to George V and George VI and served as a member of the Council of the Secretary of State for India, 1929 34. Tiwana was educated at Aitchison College, Lahore. At the age of sixteen he volunteered for war service and was commissioned to the Seventeenth Cavalry in 1918. As well as his brief World War I service, Tiwana served in the Afghan campaign which followed, earning a mention in despatches. Tiwana then assisted his father in the management of family estates in the Punjab, taking responsibility for them while his father was in London, 1929-34. He was elected to the Punjab Legislative Assembly in 1937 and immediately joined the cabinet of Sir Sikander Hayat Khan, who had successfully led the Punjab Unionist Party in the election, as Minister of Public Works. Tiwana remained in this post until 1942, succeeding Sir Sikander as Prime Minister of the Punjab from 1942 until 1947. He was a member of the Indian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1946. Tiwana resigned his premiership in March 1947. Although he remained at Simla until independence, he did not thereafter seek an active part in politics and left the country, returning to Pakistan in October 1949. Among his principal concerns was the preservation of the family estates at Kalra from the exigencies of land reform and government control. He was awarded an OBE in 1931 and made a KCSI in 1946. (I.Talbot KHIZR TIWANA, THE PUNJAB UNIONIST PARTY AND THE PARTITION OF INDIA (Richmond, 1996).)