By Harjap Singh Aujla
Emperor Ranjit Singh had militarily conquered Majha and Doaba regions of Punjab in entirety. But in a treaty signed with the British rulers of the rest of India, Emperor Ranjit Singh was prohibited from making forays into the Cis-Sutlej areas of the Punjab. Two towns in this region Ferozepore and Ludhiana were the biggest bastions of the Imperial power on the border of Emperor Ranjit Singh’s Empire.
The inherently expansionist British rulers of the rest of India were more than interested in targeting the Ranjit Empire too. They were waiting for the death of the Emperor, to invade the Capital Lahore. It took them ten more years before they took control of Lahore. Even after annexing Lahore, Their biggest military base of Ferozepore always remained one of their favorite cities. When Punjab was divided into districts, which were the equivalent of counties in Great Britain in importance, among the flatland districts they made Ferozepore the biggest. It consisted of Tehsils Zeera, Ferozepore, Fazilka (including Abohar). Muktsar and Moga (a Sikh majority Tehsil). In population however both Lahore and Amritsar, due to the massive size of their urban agglomerations were larger than Ferozepore. In terms of geographical area the most wide spread was the Hill district of Kangra.
Decades after India’s independence, some of the tehsils of Ferozepore districts also became very important. At one time the then Chief Minister Giani Zail Singh wanted to give status of district to his home town of Faridkot. He took out the populous tehsils of Muktsar and Moga out of Ferozepore and merged with Faridkot. Later on another Chief Minister Harcharan Singh Brar converted Muktsar into a new district. Subsequently the powerful leadership of Moga got the Moga Tehsil converted into a new district. Later on the Dharamkot constituency of Zeera Tehsil, under pressure from the politicians of Moga, got the Dharamkot Assembly Constituency of Zeera tehsil delinked from Zeera and attached to Moga district. Finally even Fazilka Tehsil got delinked from Ferozepore district and became a district.
By a sheer coincidence, when on Wednesday August 28th, 2024, the union cabinet took a decision to allot private FM radio channels to important cities India including Punjab, four of the former Tehsils of Ferozepore got three private FM channels each for the towns of Abohar (Fazilka district), Muktsar, Moga and Ferozepore itself. Long after brutal fragmentation of erstwhile great Ferozepore district, its four important subdivisions got the lion’s share of 12 out of 28 channels allocated to the important cities of Punjab. The remaining 16 channels have been allocated to Ludhiana (4), Bathinda (3), Barnala (3), Hoshiarpur (3) and Pathankot(3).
E-mail: harjapaujla@gmail.com, Phone +91 98149 06024