From My Armchair (To My Macbook)

Thoughts on the NFC

2009-12-10T22:31:00.000-08:00

This whole debate on criteria for distribution of revenue between provinces is completely superfluous. We are a federation – at least in name. And the current government seems to want to make that a reality. It then follows that the NFC award should be abolished entirely and the system reversed. Provincial governments should get control of their own revenue and give only a fixed percentage to the center. No interprovincial redistribution is required. If the federal government wants to fund a specific project in a poorer province or supplement a cash-strapped or overpopulated province's budget, it can do so out of its own share.

I fail to understand the logic of wholesale transfer of taxes paid by residents of one province to another simply because the other province has more people. This just does not hold in a federation.

The fact that Sindh, which contributes 60% of Pakistan's revenue, gets to keep only 20% (25% of the divisible pool) for itself seems like an utter travesty. There is no incentive for people of Sindh to pay taxes because anything they contribute beyond a certain amount will not be spent on them at all. People living in other provinces, on the other hand, not only have their own taxes spent on them (excluding what goes to the federal government) but also get money from the people of Sindh.

I'm not saying that provinces should not help each other out or support development in other places. Once each province gets control of their own revenues then provincial governments can certainly lend and borrow from each other or even give aid. But taxes of a particular province should be spent in accordance with the wishes of its people and its elected government.

One could counter that the people of Sindh also have a voice in the federal government, which makes it equally qualified to spend Sindh's money. First, that is contrary to the concept of a federation. Second, because Sindh gets representation in the center according to its population, which is small, its voice cannot be heard as loudly. Historically, it has been very easy for Punjab to ride roughshod over the wishes of other provinces because it has the majority in the center. Just two days ago when IRSA stopped water supply to Punjab because it had drawn more than its share from the Indus, Punjab went to the center and forced it to release more water in contravention of the interprovincial watersharing agreement. Farmers in Sindh are going to get less than their share of water this season because of Punjab's arm-twisting. Lesson: justice for smaller provinces is hard to get at the center.

From where I stand, the NFC award is entirely suspect. Punjab asserting its right to the lions share of the revenue, most of which it did not generate itself, is laughable. If I'm paying oodles of money in taxes every month, I'd like to see them spent here, where I live, first.

The Media Code of Conduct

2009-11-08T02:12:00.000-08:00

The code of conduct that eight television channels agreed to on November 6 has received deafening applause. Given that the plaudits are coming from the mainstream media itself, I'm not particularly inclined to take them very seriously. The code was a long time coming and while The News today patted itself on the back for its "emerging maturity" it failed to mention that the code saw the light of day only because of the threat of government interference.

Don't get me wrong. I do not agree with the amendments the assembly was going to make in the PEMRA Act. The clauses forbidding any talk prejudicial to the ideology and sovereignty of Pakistan (whatever that means) and anything that ridicules the head of state, armed forces, bureaucracy or judiciary were blatant attempts at censorship. But the media has not been very responsible in exercising its newfound freedom.

The code addresses some of the media's shortcomings. Violent images will not be broadcast and more care will be taken in verifying facts and reporting hostage situations live. But it remains unclear how binding this code really is. Reading the Dawn report one gets the impression that it is not. It repeats ad nauseam that the the code is just a voluntary guideline. In fact, the words "voluntary" and "voluntarily" appear eight times! Does that mean that these channels can disregard the code whenever the please? Will there be no comprehensive system of regulation, no penalties for infractions? Apparently not.

This supposed sign of maturity seems more like a puerile publicity stunt. A ploy to get the government and the public off the media's back. And even then the media failed to mention in its "voluntary guidelines" any resolve against advocating violence. The pogrom against Ahmadis that Aamir Liaquat Hussain's show of 7 September 2008 sparked does not seem to sit very heavy on the media's conscience. Freedom of speech has its limits and preaching violence against human beings is beyond the pale. Preaching the murder of Pakistani citizens on national television is nothing short of abominable. But the media has not even paid lip service to preventing such deplorable incidents.

I don't think this code of conduct is good for much. Ideally, the government, media and civil society should sit down and come to an agreement on a code of ethics, which should be made into law and enforced by a regulatory body through fines and penalties. The code should be precise in wording (like the media's code of conduct not the assembly's proposed amendments) but it should also be binding. If the media is serious about its role as the fourth pillar of democracy it has to step up and accept the responsibilities that come with the job.

Thrown to the wolves

2009-10-28T11:45:00.000-07:00

Charming, open and conciliatory, Hillary Clinton did very well by my estimation in her conversation with the Pakistani press tonight. Meeting with so many fiercely anti-American journalists at once might have seemed suicidal but she pulled it off. Clinton admitted to America's past mistakes, to Bush's blunders, to America's part in creating the Taliban and expressed the Obama administration's desire to "turn a new page" on Pak-US relations repeatedly.

She addressed the Kerry-Lugar Bill fiasco reasonably well, too. First, she admitted that America should have been more sensitive to Pakistan's reaction and then pointed out that (a) the conditions attached were normal consistent with aid bills to countries like Israel and Egypt; (b) they were also binding only on the US government and not Pakistan; (c) American legislators had to explain the massive $7.5 billion aid to their constituents, who in such hard times would want the money to be spent at home, making these kinds of checks necessary.

The journos – one from each major news channel – all seemed fixated on Kerry-Lugar and one after another repeated the same worn out question about the gap between her friendly words and the imperial designs of KLB. When asked this the umpteenth time she lost her cool, declaring very emphatically that Pakistan is free to refuse US aid if it so pleases, that America was not forcing Pakistan to accept it. The exasperation behind the comment was counterproductive but otherwise Clinton kept her own.

All those bloodthirsty town halls she put herself through on the election trail last year really paid off. The six journalists tonight turned out to be no challenge for her at all. Her Pakistan green blouse was perhaps a bit much but at least she managed to placate the anti-America camp in my family. Am curious to see what the rest of Pakistan thought...

The People of Waziristan

2009-10-28T09:04:00.000-07:00

Who are the people of Waziristan? I've been reading news reports in foreign and Pakistani papers and my sense is that nobody is sure who the average resident of Waziristan is; what his or her beliefs, opinions and aspirations are. But four molds have emerged in which they are most likely to be cast:

1. Ferocious tribesman: When invoking this image, the independent spirit and rugged fierceness of the people are invariably expounded. British colonial experience is often cited too. At best, it is used to predict the outcome of the current war as if Waziristan has remained completely unchanged for the interim half century. At worst, analysts and journalists quote Orientalist balderdash that often talks about the people of Waziristan as animals. Prime examples of the former are Roedad Khan and Shafqat Mehmood's opinion pieces in The News and Nicholas Schmidle's reference to Lord Curzon in Dawn. The most flagrant offender in the latter category has been the New York Times. Jane Perlez's story from a few days back quoted Sir Olaf Caroe comparing Mehsuds to a pack of wolves and Wazirs to lonely panthers. There's also Salman Masood talking about "taming the tribes" in The National.

2. Diehard terrorist: This model holds that all the residents of Waziristan are Taliban or Taliban sympathizers at the very least. This doesn't come up in news reports as much as it does in conversation with journalists. More often than not, journalists reporting from Waziristan will tell you that there is little to no difference between tribesmen and the Taliban. This view is linked to the ferocious tribesman mold in describing the brutality of the people of Waziristan. But in explaining their motives it uses Islamic fundamentalism as opposed to thirst for independence.

3. Helpless refugee: This view has become more prominent since Rah-e-Nijat started. It presents Waziristanis as victims of war, disillusioned with the Taliban and the army, just waiting to return to the lives they were uprooted from. Articles that talk in this vein paint people from Waziristan as extremely backward, barely on the fringes of civilization. Dawn published one such article a few days ago but the best example of this has to be yesterday's editorial in The News. The editorial talks at great length about the immense hardship IDPs from Waziristan are facing and the deplorable conditions of life in Waziristan. It is quite transparent in its attempt to stir liberal guilt and is more than a little condescending towards people from Waziristan. At one point the editorial mentions that the refugees are tremendously grateful for the blankets, food and medicine they have received.

4. Pakistanis like us: This mold is invoked only when condemning drone attacks. When a drone kills 20 or so people in FATA, the people stop existing as ferocious tribesmen or crazed terrorists or deprived underdogs and take on the role of green and white Pakistanis, whose death you and I, all of Pakistan, must mourn as its own.

None of these descriptions are convincing, especially since the motives behind the molds are so transparent. The first two are used to form an opinion for or against Rah-e-Nijat. The third to blame militancy on underdevelopment and the fourth to stoke anti-American ire. All fail to give any real insight into the people of Waziristan. More damagingly, they tend towards dehumanizing them.

I don't know who the real Waziristani is. I'm pretty certain that he or she is not entirely explained by the above four models. I'm also sure that it is very crucial for the rest of Pakistan to understand Waziristanis, the people who have lived with, and perhaps even supported, the Taliban for so long. That we have failed to do so is a grave failing on the part of our media and ourselves.

Miserable Timing

2009-10-28T07:45:00.000-07:00

Manmohan Singh calls on Pakistan to destroy terrorists during a visit to Indian-administered Kashmir. The timing cannot be worse.

Earlier today a car bomb ripped through Peshawar's biggest and most crowded market, Meena Bazaar. The death toll has been rising since the morning and now stands at 95 people. A building has collapsed with people reportedly trapped inside. Others have been burnt to death. Hospitals have run out of blood as they struggle to treat more than 200 injured.

I've been to Meena Bazaar several years ago. I remember it as a place with narrow streets, shops spilling over each other, people thronging the lanes browsing shop after shop full of bright fabrics. A bomb there must have wreaked havoc. The pictures are nightmarish.

Even as this tragedy unfolds, Mr. Singh has decided to lecture Pakistan. If at this time, the Indian government could not find it in itself to condole Pakistan then perhaps it would have been best for it to have stayed silent.

With Pakistanis dying horrific deaths almost daily, we are well aware of the need to destroy the terrorists. Thank you very much.

Mother of all battles?

2009-10-26T21:22:00.000-07:00

Correction: This post was written on the false premise that Wana is the hub of TTP. In fact, as Rabia has kindly pointed out, Wana is controlled by groups that have promised to stay neutral to the fight. One of the three prongs of the army offensive has taken off from Wana (the other two originating from Razmak and Tank). The post also erroneously identifies Ladha as the focus of the operation instead of Makeen. I make the point that so far the operation has been a cat and mouse game with the Taliban never sticking around to put up a serious fight, which means that the real fight will begin once the army settles in and the Taliban can go on the offensive with its blitz attacks. That assessment I would stick to despite the factual errors in this post.

This "mother of all battles" looks to me like little more than a cop out. The army's three-pronged strategy is set to converge not on Wana, which is the centre of South Waziristan, but on Ladha, which is on the border with army-controlled North Waziristan. They are going west/north-west from Tank and south from North Waziristan. Maybe after capturing Ladha, they'll head down towards Wana but for now there is no mention of any such plan or of Wana at all in news reports.

After a week of steady "we killed ten, they killed three" press releases, the army trumpeted its capture of Kotkai. Everyone got very excited because its Hakimullah's birthplace but really Kotkai is little more than a hamlet on the way to Ladha. Somewhere between Jandola and Ladha, Kotkai was not the theater of the great showdown either. From the body count the army gave, it seems like most of the militants fled the area. If I had to make an educated guess, I'd say they went for Wana seeing as fleeing to Ladha would have them cornered.

Now it seems like the army has its eyes set on Sararogha, another pit stop on the way to Ladha. But time is running out rapidly. If you can tell that winter is coming in Karachi, then it most certainly has to be freezing in the mountains of Waziristan. At the rate that the army is going, I have a feeling that they'll capture Ladha in several weeks by which time winter will make further advance impossible. There will be no major battle in Ladha either as the 10,000 militants of South Waziristan will all have packed their bags and moved to Wana. The army will declare victory and settle in for the winter, leaving most of South Waziristan in TTP's hands.

And of course only once the army roosts will the battle really begin. Attrition is the Taliban's tactic of choice and they're damn good at it too. Their part of South Waziristan would be a perfect base to launch suicide and fidayeen attacks on the army for the rest of winter. All we'll be able to do is sit there and take it or retreat.

(Map taken from BBC.)

How will it all end?

2009-10-18T21:32:00.000-07:00

After decades of careful effort by the military, we have thoroughly institutionalized violence in our country. Pakistani terrorists have turned their violence on our own people and on three of our four neighbours. We now have a most bewildering patchwork of militant groups, each out to kill someone or the other in the name of Islam, bankrolled at some point or the other by the army and its supporters. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Muhammad, Jundollah, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Tehrik-e-Taliban (itself a coalition of dozens of militant factions), it seems like we have more militant organizations than NGOs.

We carry out an operation against Swat Taliban and there are reports of Jaish-e-Muhammad expanding its hold in southern Punjab. We start an operation in South Waziristan and there are reports of Taliban and al-Qaeda entrenched in Quetta. It seems like every time we muster up the resolve to deal with one faction another springs to prominence. How we will stamp out all these groups, I have no idea. Does the army even want to dismantle all the militant organizations? How does it end?

The Kerry Lugar Crazies Pt 2

2009-10-10T23:30:00.000-07:00

The unabated storm over the Kerry Lugar Bill confirms two trends that do not augur well for our democratic experiment. First, that the military establishment, despite its apparent complaisance, is actually loathe to relinquish power. That the army has expressed its disapproval so strongly, directly and indirectly (for let's face it, at least some of the shrieking in the media is at the army's behest), bodes ill for the future of democracy. Then again, I am not entirely closed to the possibility that the army just feels backed into a corner, dealing with a formidable insurgency, India and a hostile public and then suddenly finding its stream of cash dammed. Perhaps, its a case of asking too much too soon. But its much more likely that the army doesn't want to hand over real control to the civilian administration at all.

The second issue that Kerry Lugar has brought to the fore is the complete immaturity of the media and politicians. In 2008, it seemed like the media would be the strongest pillar of democracy but channels like Geo have sacrificed the country's interests for sensationalism. It is after all so much easier and more profitable to sell shrill anti-Americanism than responsible tempered reportage.

The opposition too has decided to cash in on the anti-American current in Pakistani opinion at a very real risk of destabilizing the current government and forsaking the very real benefits to our economy and to the lives of Pakistanis. It was a truly cringeworthy moment when a series of MNAs were interviewed on Geo, all of them admitting to having opposed Kerry Lugar in the assembly without actually having read the bill. I had thought that the opposition, especially PMLN, had been aware that if they rocked the boat too much they would all end up overboard, but that willingness to preserve the democratic order over party interests seems to have disappeared.

The government's weaknesses have been exposed in this furor too. They have been unable to effectively project their point of view in the media. The best of them have come off sounding like sheepish apologists for nefarious American interests. They should have cast themselves as defenders of democracy and the average Pakistani.

Bringing the fight to the GHQ

2009-10-10T23:18:00.000-07:00

The Taliban have thrown down the gauntlet. The final showdown in South Waziristan can't be too far. What is unclear is whether or not the months-long blockade and the hesitant skirmishes were a strategic blunder on the army's part. But whether it gave the Talib a breather or a blow, they seem ready for the impending fight. Now that the GHQ has been attacked, the army will be galvanized into action too.

The road ahead is tough. The casualties many. But its time that we steel ourselves and clean up our mess.

The Kerry-Lugar Crazies

2009-10-06T09:32:00.000-07:00

Given the tenor of anti-Americanism of late, the fuss over the Kerry-Lugar Bill is far from surprising. But the utter lack of depth and intelligence in the frenzied discussions on TV and in the National Assembly is deeply disappointing. We just secured 7.5 billion dollars worth of non-military aid. That is a huge sum of money. At 1.5 billion dollars a year (120 billion rupees) it equals to over 10% of our annual tax revenue (revenue for 2008-09 stands at 1150 billion rupees). In other words, the bill makes our government 10% richer!

To be sure, Kerry-Lugar comes with strings attached. But the bill that passed in the US Congress is nowhere as stringent as the original draft, which thanks to the lobbying of our government was watered down substantially. And given Pakistan’s circumstances, some of the strings that come with the money are in fact pretty good for the people.

The most important and least talked of condition is that none of the aid be spent on the military. The money will instead fund programs in basic education, agriculture, maternal and child health, higher education, family planning, microenterprise, disease eradication and so on. In my opinion that is fantastic news. The US has been giving huge dollops of aid to the Pak army since the war on terror began and the people of Pakistan had been largely ignored.

The fact that America isn’t simply cutting the government a check is also a plus. It means that the fat cats in the government and bureaucracy won’t be able to get their grubby paws on the wads of green. After the massive misuse of international aid meant for the earthquake victims, America has become much more wary of our venal ruling elite.

So far so good. Now for the controversial stuff. A clause, which Kamran Khan has termed “the most provocative clause”, goes as follows: “An assessment of the extent to which the government of Pakistan exercises effective civilian control of the military, including a description of the extent to which civilian executive leaders and parliament exercise oversight and approval of military budgets, the chain of command, the process of promotion for senior military leaders, civilian involvement in strategic guidance and planning, and military involvement in civil administration.” Khan finds this clause immensely objectionable and has declared it a conspiracy to drive a wedge between the government and the military. So basically, the politicians, journos and pundits are pissed because America wants to make sure it gives aid to a civilian government rather than a military one? Aren’t these guys supposed to be anti-establishment? Weren’t they on a crusade against America because it had been supporting Musharraf and the establishment? Now they don’t want the world’s superpower to keep our military in check?

Next issue. Every year before aid can be released, the US State Department will need to assure the Congress that the Pakistan military and intelligence agencies are not supporting terrorist groups and are still keen on pursuing terrorists. This according to Kamran Khan is a “damning declaration” that paints our venerable forces as terrorist sympathizers. Ummm… Wasn’t it the Pakistani media that has been harping on the terrorist-military connection for this past decade? Weren’t we all sick and tired of the intelligence agencies supporting groups that bomb Pakistanis, capture our territory and fuel sectarian conflict? The fact that there are Taliban sympathizers in the military is not news to anyone. That the US wants to keep the military honest on this count too can only be a good thing.

As far as I can see, the strings that supposedly rob us of our sovereignty are just the kind of leverage the civilian government needs to keep the army at bay. The only loser in this scenario is the army, which not only gets zero money under the bill but is also put on probation. So shouldn’t the politicians and the media be applauding rather than jeering Kerry-Lugar? Shouldn’t the public get over its knee-jerk anti-Americanism and see the bill for the good thing that it is?

The only condition that I can fathom the Pakistani public objecting to is that the US wants Pakistan to dismantle its nuclear weapons proliferation network. This is a sensitive subject for Pakistanis. Most of us love our nuclear bomb and are keen to retain our right to sell it to whomever we want. And if most really feel that passionately about our right to proliferate nuclear weapons then sure go ahead and turn down the 7.5 billion dollars. The army will certainly be delighted. And while our schools and hospitals won’t see any of that cherished green, at least military aid will continue unabated. A win-win for the army. And the public can sleep soundly at night believing that with the Americans out of the way we will have secured a sovereign democratic federation for ourselves.

Correction: The Kerry-Lugar Bill is even better than I had thought. All these military-related strings are applicable to aid attached to the Pak army not the development aid, which means that the bill should be a dream come true for anyone who supports democracy in this country. Clearly, the media and the opposition are not in that camp.

Competition Commission forced by the SC to discourage competition

2009-10-05T21:50:00.000-07:00

Has anyone noticed the Supreme Court's recent instructions that the Competition Commission Pakistan fix the price of sugar? I'm assuming that it is not entirely awake to the irony of a competition watchdog fixing prices. Its Econ 101 Mr. Chief Justice. The way to ensure that sugar finds its optimal price is to strictly impose anti-cartel laws. If each sugar mill is setting its price independently, the retail cost will come down automatically: without an agreement between mills, it is in the interest of every mill to keep its prices as low as possible to get an edge over the competition.

Fixing prices may seem like a more surefire way of doing things but it has proven to be impossible to implement so far. Plus, its notoriously difficult to determine the optimal price. But suppose the government does manage to enforce an ideal fixed price, if and when the production costs of sugar increase, the fixed price will drive mills to bankruptcy, creating a genuine supply crisis. And if the government then decides to raise the price for legitimate reasons it will have a political disaster on its hands. Better to let the market take care of all that and let the CCP do its real job.

Monkey's short escape from cage: CM forms body to look into zoo affairs

2009-10-05T21:19:00.000-07:00

LAHORE, Oct 5: A monkey escaped from its cage and kept the Lahore zoo staff running after it for several hours on Monday.

It was caught by the zoo staff with the help of Rescue-1122 after a hectic struggle.

Zoo staff said the colobus monkey escaped when a keeper went into the cage for cleaning it but left the door open. The monkey disappeared into trees and was finally spotted on the trees near the road facing Alhamra Art Centre. As the rescue team and zoo staff climbed up the trees, the monkey came down and hid in nearby bushes. Zoo staff surrounded the area and finally took the monkey back to the cage.

Punjab Wildlife Department Director-General Jahangir Ghauri said the matter was being investigated and staff responsible for this incident would be taken to task.

Zoo director Zafar Shah, however, termed monkey’s escape a conspiracy against the present zoo administration. He said some elements who did not want to see him as director were behind such moves.

However, he did not mention the names of those elements.

This article in Dawn caught my attention. Maila Times couldn't have come up with a better spoof. Goes to show how absurd life can really get in Pakistan.

Sadly, the rest of the article isn't really very chuckle-worthy. It lists a whole Noah's ark full of animals that have died under the Lahore Zoo's watch. A lioness died of renal failure after she was given too much antibiotic. Five urials (wild sheep according to Google) died of poisoning when the zoo decided to spray the grass with insecticide. Three cubs also died recently. And a macaw worth 300,000 rupees mysteriously disappeared from its cage.

Think Before You Speak

2009-09-23T00:36:00.000-07:00

People have been saying some really appalling things on national television these days. The inimitable PPP MNA Firdous Ashiq Awan called Kashmala Tariq a pro on Express News. On Geo, Junaid Jamshed told the poor something to the effect that if they stayed hungry for three days the heavens would guarantee them a year's supply of food and if they protested they'd meet death ala Khouri Garden stampede. The most recent addition to the crazy circus is our Minister for Railways, ANP MNA Ghulam Ahmad Bilour who informed the nation this weekend that those fasting on Sunday (basically all Muslims not living in NWFP) were Qadianis...

Has everyone forgotten the adage "think before you speak"? Is it really too much to ask public figures in our country to pay heed to said proverb? It's like the moment they are put in front of a camera, common sense goes right out the window. Then again perhaps common sense jumped ship a long long time ago. Either ways, this is a pathetically low level on which to hold political discourse.* If our national leaders must hold such obnoxious views, the least they can do is refrain from airing them on national television. Then at least we can sustain our precious illusion of being governed by people with some modicum of intelligence and sanity.

*Note: I am no longer talking about JJ. A man who thinks that we can do nothing about inflation since angels descend from heaven every morning to fix the prices of basic commodities is a total lost cause.

Wtf!

2009-09-18T04:37:00.000-07:00

Dawn reports:

MIANWALI, Sept 16: A deputy district officer (revenue) made about two dozen people parade semi-naked in a busy bazaar before getting them booked for ‘violating sanctity of Ramazan’ as they were allegedly caught taking tea during fast timings.

Reports said those subjected to public humiliation were nabbed by a team led by Piplan DDOR Khadim Husain Jilani, who along with the police raided several small eateries at the railway station and at the bus-van stand.

The raid was conducted after the administration was informed that many restaurants were serving eatables during fast timings without seeking official permission.

The administration grants special permission to some eateries to serve food and tea to patients, travellers etc during fast.

According to eyewitnesses, after the violators were nabbed, they were ordered by the DDOR to remove their shirts. Then their hands were tied with their shirts and to each other and were made to parade semi-naked through busy bazaars before being taken to the police station where they were booked under the law.

I get it. Somewhere along the line some autocrat or the other passed a law banning public eating during Ramzan to appease the mullahs. But is this really necessary? These chaps have gone way beyond the call of duty, law and religion.

Amending the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1997

2009-09-16T21:47:00.000-07:00

The Swat offensive has been going pretty well. Everyday there is news of more Taliban laying down their arms. Recently, the army has nabbed Muslim Khan, Sher Mohammed Qasab and Mahmood Khan, three of Fazlullah's top commanders. All in all, it is reported that we have 600 captured militants awaiting trial.

The government is understandably nervous. It has an extremely shoddy record when it comes to prosecuting terrorists. Investigation is often slipshod and government attorneys unconvincing. That probably explains the government and the agencies' proclivity for disappearing people instead of trying them in court. But now it seems that the government and the military understand that a public trial of militants is essential for success against the Taliban.

To bolster its ability to prosecute militants, the government has proposed amendments to the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1997. These amendments give investigators more time to build a case, increases the maximum remand period and decreases the time for appeals. So far so good. But the amendment also proposes to reverse the burden of proof, making it the defendant's responsibility to prove his innocence rather than the prosecution's job to establish guilt. Other changes include making witness testimony to police or military officials admissible evidence. Witnesses will not have to be produced in court, depriving the defense of a chance at cross examination and giving officials plenty of leeway to coerce witnesses and even fabricate testimony. If the amendment passes, officials will also be able to conduct searches without the supervision of respectable members of the community making it easier for them to plant evidence.

All of this is tantamount to depriving the defendant of his right to a fair trial. The government can surely tighten the law but it cannot stack the deck in its favor. Not only will such an attempt sully the trials but it will give the state free license to ride roughshod over citizens' rights in the future too. We all want to see the Taliban get their just desserts but it has to be done the right way. Plus, with so many militants in custody, it shouldn't be too hard for the state to cut deals with some underlings to strengthen their cases against the bigwigs. So get to work, government, and don't subvert our rights in the process.

Our Intransigent President

2009-09-16T09:36:00.000-07:00

Obama's approval rating has dropped in recent days from a glowing 70 percent to a disquieting 50. The US economy is still flailing and the Democrat's health care plan is not going very well either. Troubled times.

Our president's popularity has flagged too in recent days, plummeting from 64 percent when he came into office a year ago to a dismal 32. Zardari's constant waffling on the judges’ issue and the seventeenth amendment has cost him the support of the Pakistani public. The government's deplorable mishandling of the sugar crisis this month will probably hurt him further.

But where Obama is facing the challenge head on, reaching out to ordinary Americans through town halls, appearances on talk shows, a Congress address and so on, Zardari has either absconded on pricey foreign tours or remained locked up in the presidential palace. Obama it seems is back on the campaign trail just a few months after assuming office, doing his best to reassure Americans and rally them to his cause. He is taking serious flak from detractors: some 2000 protesters besieged him in Portsmouth, N.H., where he addressed a town hall meeting in August, some chanting "Euthanize Obama!" But Obama remains undeterred. Conversely, Zardari’s approach has been to whine endlessly about some uncertain minus one conspiracy against him. He has decided to deal with the barrage of criticism by petulantly threatening to arrest Pakistanis who make fun of him in personal emails and text messages.

The vast difference in the maturity of these two leaders should be quite obvious. Zardari has so far made no concerted effort to reach out to the public. Hell, he hasn’t even bothered to visit Swat since Operation Rah-i-Rast was launched in April. It is extremely ironic that a democratic leader should have such antipathy to the people he was elected to serve. One can only hope that on his latest two-week foreign tour, which will culminate in a visit to Washington, Zardari will use his time productively and learn a thing or two from Obama (instead of chatting up married women). Zardari has to realize that, short of abandoning Pakistan's latest foray into democracy, the only way to keep him and the PPP in power in the long run is to give the people what they want.

A month after Gojra: No end to the madness

2009-09-16T07:48:00.000-07:00

On September 5, unknown persons set the Guru Granth Sahib and the Bhagavad Gita (the holy books of Sikhs and Hindus, respectively) on fire in a temple in Kandhkot, Sindh. Sikhs and Hindus of the area were extremely distressed but despite the desecration remained peaceful.

On September 10, Lawrence Jan, a sixty year old Christian man living in Orangi, Karachi, was accused of blasphemy by his neighbor. The story goes that Jan urinated off his roof onto his neighbor's where some religious material had been left. When the accusations were made, 250-300 people attacked Jan's house. For good measure, the mob attacked another uninvolved Christian's home too.

The police then proceeded to arrest Jan's brother and nephew (Jan himself could not be found) and beat them up for two days without registering an FIR against them. It now seems that there is no eyewitness to confirm the accusation against Jan. Nonetheless, he has decided to pay compensation to put the incident behind him. Local mosques are gleefully announcing this news.

On September 11, an angry mob of Muslims burnt down a church in Sialkot. They were incensed by (unverified) reports of a nineteen year old Christian boy, Robert Masih, having desecrated the Quran. The story goes that Robert snatched the Quran from a ten year old girl and "disrespected" it (whatever that means). The natural response it seems was to burn down a church. Terrorized Christians living in the area immediately began to flee.

Under pressure from the mob, the police arrested Robert, who, when presented before a judge, was not granted bail but sent to judicial remand for fourteen days. In jail Robert was kept in solitary confinement and was found dead four days later on September 15. The police insist suicide. Others suspect death by torture. Furious members of the Christian community came out to protest, attacking thirteen shops.

Most people continue to believe that non-Muslim Pakistanis face no discrimination in this country.

Updates: It has been reported that townsfolk in collusion with the police have refused Robert burial in his hometown.

How Industrialist Greed is a Good Thing a.k.a. Why You Should Vote for the PPP Again

2009-09-11T08:21:00.000-07:00

You have to give Prime Minister Gilani credit for finding a silver lining where none seems possible. The sugar crisis is apparently a godsend for Pakistanis. You see we consume way too much sugar. At 25 kilos of sugar per person per annum, we beat sugar consumption of Indians (14 kilos), Bangladeshis (11 kilos) and the Chinese (10 kilos) by a mile. And you know nothing good comes from having sugar. Just cavities, diabetes and obesity. If the News is to be believed, Mr. Gilani is very alarmed. He is worried sick about this nation’s health.

It can only be a good thing then that the government has failed to stop the price of sugar from skyrocketing to around Rs. 50 from Rs. 25 earlier this year. Right? Lets make the people pay through their nose for their gulab jaman and jalebi addictions. They’ll only thank the PPP later when they are saved those costly trips to the dentist. Come to think of it, maybe this should be the centerpiece of the government’s health policy. And its education policy. Kerching!

And just to show us how serious Mr. Gilani is, he has told his cook to cease and desist: no more sweet dishes on the Prime Minister’s table till further notice. In one fell stroke, Mr. Gilani has rid himself of inflated sugar bills and cavities. Genius!

But wait! There’s more. If we all follow Mr. Gilani’s shining example, sugar consumption will plummet and the greedy industrialists will have to bring their prices down. See? The Pakistani people will get something even sweeter than ras gullahs. Revenge!

Baloch Hatred

2009-09-07T07:16:00.000-07:00

Teeth Maestro posted a link to a BBC Urdu interview of a 25-year-old girl from Quetta. She speaks for ten minutes with quiet passion about Baloch independence and with vast hatred about Pakistan. We read on and off about Baloch terrorism and about the agencies kidnapping Baloch nationalists but it is hard to comprehend the intensity of Baloch sentiment. That is until one hears this girl speak. In one of the most powerful moments of the interview she says, "We hate Pakistan so much, so much that all we pray for is that our hatred becomes so intense, so intense that we forget Pakistan's name, forget its existence. Just like it is kufr to say Satan's name. We want our hatred to be that intense."

In ten minutes this girl explodes the myth of common Islamic brotherhood that this country was supposedly founded on. This girl wants nothing to do with Pakistan. All she wants is independence.

Teeth Maestro in the same entry mentions that the speech reminds him of "the animosity between Hindus and Muslims" in 1947. This girl certainly reminds me of the colonial era but I think a more appropriate analogy would be the anti-colonial struggle of the early twentieth century. Every year we commemorate our nationalist heroes who fought for freedom from the British but I can't remember when I heard someone speak with so much passion about freedom in my lifetime.

This girl finds herself in a position similar to the one Jinnah, Nehru and Gandhi found themselves nearly a hundred years ago. She too finds her people oppressed and their rights denied by a power far superior economically and militarily and setting her aspirations of becoming a doctor aside, she has joined the Baloch Students Organization to fight for independence. But unlike the nemesis of the leaders of the past, her nemesis knows no rules of fair play. The agencies have killed her father and kidnapped both her brother and her cousin. Justifying her belief in violence, she says, "If we were fighting a noble enemy then we would have been fortunate enough to learn from our enmity. But we are fighting a despicable enemy and this despicable enemy only understands the language of armed resistance."

I don't want to glorify Baloch nationalists. I care deeply about Pakistan. But justice and fairness are more important and Pakistan does not hold the moral high ground here. Most Pakistanis acknowledge the injustices meted out to the Baloch but I am not sure that we realize that the damage done is very likely irreversible. We may be able to stop Balochistan from seceding but we can only watch powerless as millions of Baloch hearts secede from this country.

The Darned Blasphemy Law Again

2009-09-06T10:04:00.000-07:00

It seems the notorious Blasphemy Law has been invoked yet again. This time the victims are Abdullah and Shazia, a couple from Kasur who believe that their ten-month old son is Imam Mehdi. On September 4, an incensed group of around five hundred protesters compelled the police to arrest them in what can only be seen as a violation of the couple's freedom of religion.

Sure Abdullah and Shazia's beliefs are a bit preposterous but hey when were religious beliefs ever supposed to be logical? We don't want to hang this duo simply because their beliefs offend the majority. Now that would be really preposterous. I mean the worst of the worst that Abdullah and Shazia can be charged with is being overambitious parents. But then again who among us isn't guilty of that.

The Ethics of Fine Dining

2009-09-05T21:59:00.000-07:00

I had iftar at Pearl Continental today. My first and hopefully last iftar of the year. It was as bad as I had expected. Instead of being seated in some tastefully decorated room or hall we were led to a massive air-conditioned tent draped with fairy lights and crammed full of those awful caterers chairs and tables. The usefulness of this arrangement by my estimation was that we get to enjoy an Arabian Nights meets tacky shaadi experience (complete with a man strumming a sitar in the corner) and Pearl Continental manages to squeeze in five hundred people instead of a mere fifty or hundred every evening. At Rs. 950 per head (without tax) one can just hear the money cascading into the hotel’s back accounts.

The food, it goes without saying, was insipid. What’s more is that we were evicted within two hours. People broke their fasts around eight and by a quarter to ten Pearl Continental decided that we had had enough and merrily proceeded to switch off the lights and fold the tables around us.

But hey a mediocre evening at nosebleed prices? Well that’s just Karachi.

What really incensed me was that while I was paying five-star prices for a middling experience, Pearl Continental was making even more money by shamelessly advertising to its guests. The tent walls, apart from adorning large Quranic ayats had larger and certainly more numerous banners for a whole host of products. There were, among others, banners for Dalda, ARY, SriLankan Airline, Olpers, PTCL, Turkish Airlines, Coca Cola, FM 107, Jam-e-shireen and some diabetes gizmo. Plus, all the tables had little brochures marketing Sucral. In essence, I paid over a grand so that companies could market their hearts out to me for two hours.

These days we are used to being bombarded by advertisements 24/7 but at least in most instances ads are justifiable. We usually get a free or subsidized service in exchange for being exposed to ads. Think about television channels, newspapers, websites like Google, YouTube and Facebook, even plays these days have corporate sponsors to recoup their costs. But Pearl Continental had no need for advertisement. Its motive was pure and simple greed. Yes we are increasingly becoming a consumer society but must we really put up with this kind of unbridled corporate avarice?

The Kingmaker

2009-09-01T22:24:00.000-07:00

The tribesmen of FATA are not the only ones who are fiercely independent in this country. Pakistanis at large do not like their country's sovereignty violated either. Thus the outrage over the US drone attacks and the disdain for our politicians and men in uniform who trot on over to Washington every so often. It is entirely understandable given our struggle against colonialism and our more recent exploitation by the US to fight a proxy war against the Soviets. But the truth is that while we may be known for our stridently expressed sentiments on our sovereignty, we are, for very good reasons, not at all known for our consistency.

We are ready to burn an extravagant number of effigies of US presidents at the slightest hint of American interference in our national affairs, but we as a nation had no qualms about turning Afghanistan into a satellite state in the 90s. But never mind. Perhaps it's difficult to apply the same standards to oneself and others.

What I find very difficult to reconcile with our fiercely independent natures is how unaffected we are by Saudi Arabia's most blatant interference in our affairs. Since perhaps Zulfi Bhutto's time politicians and armymen have made way more pilgrimages to Riyadh than Mecca or Medina. In recent years, the Saudis played a very prominent role in brokering an arrangement between Nawaz Sharif and Musharraf after the coup, then again when the Sharifs returned to Pakistan and yet again when Musharraf was floundering in his own emergency-induced mess and yet again when the PPP wanted to enter some sort of arrangement with Musharraf and now once more they have stepped in to tell our government and our opposition to back off of Musharraf. Can anyone imagine the extent of our fury if Washington had peremptorily summoned Rehman Malik, flown in Musharraf on a private jet and instructed the government to play nice? TV talk show hosts would have gone apoplectic. Zaid Hamid would most definitely have spontaneously combusted. But not a squawk when Riyadh is the one tugging at our politicians' leashes.

Well, Riyadh is part of the family, an uncle of sorts. But if uncle it is, it certainly is not a benevolent one. Ask any one of the thousands of Pakistanis working there. Our citizens are treated less like part of the Muslim fraternity and more like a necessary evil that needs to be assiduously contained, belittled and ignored. We have way more of a chance integrating into American society than Saudi's.

But let that be. Put aside Saudi Arabia's current defense of an immensely unpopular ex-dictator too and its lacklustre response to our cry for help when the economy was circling the drain last year. Saudi Arabia's most egregious sin toward Pakistan was committed, much like America's, in the 80s. It was after Iran went rogue in 1979 that Riyadh really noticed us. Suddenly we were inundated with oil money and cast as the bulwark of Sunni Islam. It wasn't the US-Zia nexus of the 80s that turned Pakistan into the mess that it is today, it was the US-Saudi-Zia nexus. The US may have given us the Kalashnikov culture but Saudi Arabia gave us extremist madressahs and a generation of hate-filled fanatics. Instead of directing its largesse towards our dismal formal education sector, Riyadh built an extensive network of hardline madressahs where the Taliban of today received instruction.

Now more recently, Riyadh is in the news for reported talks with the government to lease 500,000 acres of farm land, twice the size of Hong Kong, according to Dawn reports. This farm land will be used to promote food security. Not ours, theirs. Our sparse land and water resources will be used to keep the Middle East well-fed instead of meeting the needs of our own ever-expanding and ever under-fed population. Naturally, our government is falling over itself to guarantee Riyadh special security for the huge chunk of Pakistan it is about to purchase. Who wouldn't want to fly in Riyadh's private jets in perpetuity. And here we are having an aneurysm over America's 30 acre Islamabad embassy.

The real kingmaker in Pakistan is Saudi Arabia. It has been for sometime. America can never succeed in holding too much influence because of the Pakistani public's deep deep hatred of the country. Saudi Arabia has been so successful in turning us into a client state not because it has been especially covert. In fact it's meddling has been quite naked. Its reason for success is that we have refused to analyze let alone protest its role in our national affairs. What can be a better sign of its successful imperial policy than that when in 1977 Lyallpur (Pakistan's third largest city) was renamed Faisalabad (Long Live Faisal, in English), after Saudi Arabia's King Faisal, Pakistanis actually celebrated, totally oblivious that they were trading in one imperial symbol for another.

Teenage Dirtbags

2009-09-01T03:35:00.000-07:00

And the juvenile saga of Pakistani politics continues. Of late it would seem that the PMLN, our playground bully, has received a solid kick in the shin. Judging from its shrill 48 hour ultimatum, the bully has lost his bravado and is on the verge of tears. This Jinnahpur controversy and the bribery scandal that have been dug out of its closet are making it quite red in the face.

On Monday, with barely-concealed glee, Zardari's camp called PMLN on its bluff with a sassy bring it on that would do pompom wielding Kirsten Dunst proud. Responding to PMLN spokesperson Ahsan Iqbal's huffing and puffing, Farahnaz Ispahani, spokesperson for the Zardari camp said, "As for his claim that he and his party have been holding back and have hundreds of stories to tell, we urge him and his party to bravely step forward and expose with evidence any instances of wrongdoing and corruption."

Smackdown!

But if we are to continue with the high school metaphor and PMLN is to be the bully, then it would be more appropriate for the PPP to be class president than cheerleader. The army then would be the dope-dealing PE instructor who moonlights as the headmaster. I think that sufficiently captures the fucked up nature of things here.

But the rich irony of PMLN's current situation needs no metaphor at all. It isn't enjoying the truthtelling exercise that it started now that the spotlight is turned back on it. It wasn't letting the PPP live down its recent flirtations with the army while conveniently overlooking the fact that the PMLN itself had been sired by the army in the 80s. Suddenly, the party that had smugly been deriding the NRO and digging up Zardari's past is desperate to shove its skeletons back in the closet. All the wild blather of PMLN stalwarts about nefarious conspiracies is making it sound like the Zardari camp with its tiresome bleating about the minus-one conspiracy. Reinventing oneself isn't all that easy after all.

But so far it isn't clear whether the person with the spade is Zardari, the army or whether it's a collaborative effort. The PMLN's pushy attitude on the seventeenth amendment and Musharraf's trial has surely aggravated them both. Whoever may bear the responsibility for the recent revelations, what is completely clear is that they were intended to distract the public from PMLN's talking points. Sneaky? Yes. Unethical or undemocratic? Not really. Not aside from the questionable timing anyways. Accountability is unfortunately a double-edged sword and PMLN shouldn't expect to be let off the hook just because its offenses are a bit old. Scrappy as the Sharifs have proven to be, they may have bitten off more than they can chew this time.

Amusing and enlightening as this recent brawl is, it does bring up worrying questions about the longer run. There was hope for democracy when the PPP and PMLN seemed to realize that keeping the system afloat is more important than scoring points off each other. But if the mudslinging devolves into an all-out war it won't bode well for our latest democratic foray. In principle I'm all for exposing corruption but I don't think our politicians are mature enough to handle it nor is there anyone with hands clean enough to survive a tell-all. And if our leaders lose the people's support in their Cain and Abel squabbles there will be no one around to defend them if the army comes a'knocking.

Those Ten Thousand Promises

2009-08-24T23:08:00.000-07:00

It seems that the sweet nothings that Manmohan Singh whispered into Yousaf Raza Gilani's ear at the romantic Egyptian resort have in fact come to nothing. Dialogue between India and Pakistan is once again predicated on action against terrorists. This time it is India's External Affairs Minister SM Krishna who poured cold water over the feverish promises of that brief but torrid Sharm el-Sheikh honeymoon.

Perhaps he felt obliged to play the censorious father to the blossoming Veer-Zaara love story. Or perhaps he felt duty bound to rescue our gallant Veer from disgrace. It has been clear for a while that Singh’s ardor was nowhere as openheartedly embraced in India as Veer’s was. The right has been busy castigating him for his unseemly display. But then again, from the crusaders against Valentines Day, this reaction can hardly come as a surprise.

On the other hand, Zaara it seems has been ready to take the plunge for nearly a decade. She has been strutting her markets quite seductively before Veer despite alarmed Pakistani industrialists’ best attempts to cover her up. Now if only Veer would grow a pair, make up his damned mind, Zaara’s rabid ex-fiance be put down and their families resolve their property dispute…

This saga really has dragged on for an inordinate amount of time, even by Bollywood’s extravagant standards. And the heaps of unnecessary plot twists are making this story more tiresome than Star Plus soaps. Even Yash Chopra couldn’t have come up with a more convoluted storyline.

I just want to fast-forward to the end of this god awful film, catch a weekend plane to Bombay without having to deal with the cumbersome visa and registration process and knock back a couple of mojitos with my friends there. Is that really too much to ask? Is it?

The Fallacy of the Authentic Other

2009-08-23T09:58:00.000-07:00

Last week I had written a post about making our national identity more inclusive. Since then I’ve been thinking a lot about how rich English-speaking Pakistanis are excluded from the national identity by the discourse of authenticity. This discourse is most obvious in the Urdu media where columnists and talk show hosts enthusiastically denounce English-speaking Pakistanis as traitors and dupes of the West. But what is a bit more surprising is that this discourse is equally prevalent in the English media and among English-speaking Pakistanis, who also tend to see themselves as less-than-authentic Pakistanis.

This past Tuesday Koel Gallery put up a photography and video show by Maazin Kamal and Ahmed Omar titled “Bereft in the Fatherland”. It was as apt an example of this discourse in English speakers as I could imagine. The photos were high contrast black and white portraits of orphan children from Machar Colony, the largest slum in Karachi. In each photograph an orphan stared out with large doleful eyes, the image framed so tightly around the child that the background was invisible. Under each of the dozen or so photographs were Urdu couplets that read like plaintive pleas from the children. The one on the brochure, which if memory serves is quite typical of the rest, reads:

میری حساس امیدوں سے لرزتا ہے زماں
پر میرے دیس کی مٹی پہ میرا نام نہیں

At the opening, people, including myself, were hunched over the couplets struggling to decipher them. Later, over doodh pati and dhoklas, people clucked about these unfortunate souls captured so poignantly by the intrepid photographer. The whole show, consciously or subconsciously, was aimed to remind the viewer of the ‘real Pakistan’ outside the air-conditioned art galleries and cafes. The insistence on using Urdu for the poetry when most of the people there were much more comfortable in English further emphasized those children’s authentic pakistaniat.

Perhaps, someone will argue that the poetry was giving voice to the disenfranchised children and their voice of course cannot be in English. In that case it would have been more accurate for the poetry to be in Bengali, Sindhi and Pushto, the languages most heard in Machar Colony. But the fact is that those photographs had very little to do with reality. They were more interested in constructing the authentic other. The expressions were consciously selected by Maazin – it is hard to believe that these children, difficult as their lives are, never smile. The poetry was carefully crafted by Simi Kamal, Maazin’s mother and is tantamount to putting words in the children’s mouths. The decision to make the images black and white further aesthetizes them adding to their carefully calculated poignancy.

The photographs were the visual embodiment of ‘the masses’ whom the rich so airily talk about: the illiterate masses, the unfed masses, the helpless masses, the masses that need our sympathy and assistance. They put forward an utterly uncritical, patronizing and reductive view of the children of Machar Colony. The photographs reminded me of those NGO ads that pop up during Ramzan exhorting people to give zakat. They too use especially pitiful images of the ‘helpless masses’ to loosen people’s purse strings. But at the very least the money NGOs collect goes to people with similar needs to the ones who had excited the viewer’s sympathy. The money earned from the sale of these photographs goes straight to the photographer and the gallery, which strikes me as little more than exploitation.

But there is more to the story than Maazin and Mom’s dubious use of the orphans’ photographs. These images appeal to English-speaking Pakistanis. We like casting ourselves as saviors of these orphans. These images evoke noble (and thus pleasurable) sentiments in us. They simultaneously confirm our superiority over that other Pakistan. And equally crucially they stir in us a delectable guilt over our privilege and our inability to relate or even communicate with this other Pakistan. It becomes a delicious exercise of self-flagellation. Evoking the unfortunate but authentic other becomes a form of masturbation for English-speaking Pakistanis: a quick and easy way to revel in and relieve our feelings of guilt.

Tellingly, what is missing from rich English-speakers’ conception of the authentic other is the Pakistani middle class. The middle class is equally conspicuous in its absence from Pakistani art. But this is wholly understandable. The middle class is a bit too much like the rich and their antagonism is a bit too palpable. They wield economic and political power and frankly the rich don’t really know what to make of the middle class. This is not to imply that the two groups are hermetically sealed or entirely antagonistic. There are way more familial links connecting the upper and middle classes than between the upper and working classes. It is more that we (not just the rich but Pakistanis at large) haven’t quite made sense of who the middle class is as a social group and what its role, character and capabilities are. It is easier then to cast the authentic other as the helpless poor Pakistani and leave it at that.

Ahmed Omar’s video, on the other hand, was a refreshing contrast to the photographs. It was a long clip of children playing in a street in Machar Colony. The strength of the work lay in the freedom it gave to the subjects. The camera lay stationary, the shot was uninterrupted by cuts and the children played without interference or apparent direction. They bounced all about the street and every so often came up to the camera and boldly peered in. They asked for no sympathy and were in fact extremely relatable. Their exuberance and curiosity immediately reminded me of my own three-year-old sister. In Omar’s video, the aesthetized other of Maazin’s work recovered their humanity. The other it turns out is not so different after all.

Corrigendum: The post incorrectly notes that sales from the exhibition went to the artists. Profits, in fact, went to the Hisaar Foundation, an NGO that works in Pakistan's slums. Furthermore, while the post attributes authorship of the photographs to Maazin Kamal and of the video installation to Ahmed Omar, they were both collaborative efforts.

Repealing the Blasphemy Law

2009-08-18T04:12:00.000-07:00

In other news, Minister for Minorities Affairs Shahbaz Bhatti told Dawn that the government was working on a bill to reverse the discriminatory laws enacted by Zia. Can this tantalizingly vague remark be construed as a promise to repeal the blasphemy law? Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani's earlier but equally vague statement about reviewing laws "detrimental to religious harmony" seems to lend some credence to this conjecture. It would certainly be a very appropriate move after all the criticism the blasphemy law has attracted post-Gojra.

But already the right-wing spin doctors have declared Gojra to be a meticulously orchestrated conspiracy against the blasphemy law by unnamed sources who are set on undermining Islam. The rhetoric is appalling in its bald-facedness but is also quite familiar. The downer is that the Pakistani public too seems in synch with the right on this issue. A recent Pew Institute poll found that 78% Pakistanis support the death penalty for apostasy. While there were no questions on blasphemy, the apostasy question should serve as a gauge for Pakistani opinion on the issue. The survey was conducted before Gojra though and perhaps opinions have shifted thereafter.

Nonetheless, repealing the blasphemy law seems to be a politically tricky task. But a few years earlier, the Hudood Ordinance seemed just as much of a sacred cow. The right was certainly fulminating with more venom back then but the amendment still went through. Then again, the Hudood Ordinance was amended by a dictator who at that time at least was somewhat impervious to public opinion. The only hope that I see is in the Pakistan Peoples Party's commitment to human rights. It did put aside its differences with Musharraf to support the Hudood Ordinance amendment. It also recently passed a law against domestic violence. But it still hasn't followed through on its promise to abolish the death penalty. So overall, the PPP's record is a bit mixed. But maybe, just maybe, now too it will take a politically risky move and rid Pakistan of the blasphemy law. One can only wait and see, I suppose.

War of attrition?

2009-08-18T03:14:00.000-07:00

Dawn just reported that the army will need several more months to launch a ground operation against Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan in South Waziristan. It cites Lieutenant-General Nadeem Ahmed who addressed the press after meeting with Richard Holbrooke, America's point person for Pakistan and Afghanistan. Lt Gen Ahmed gives a whole bevy of reasons including shortage of equipment and the lack of availability of planes, which are currently in use in Swat, and so on.

But Lt Gen Ahmed also talks about creating the right conditions before a ground operation. His direct quote in Dawn is "Once you feel that the conditions are right and you have been able to substantially dent their infrastructure and their fighting capacity, then you go in for a ground offensive." To achieve these optimal conditions, the army seems to have laid siege to South Waziristan, blocking roads, bombing militant hideouts and such.

I sincerely hope that the army is keeping in mind the human consequence of this approach. A war of attrition will disproportionately affect civilians in South Waziristan. Adopting such an approach just days after the collective punishment clause of the Frontier Crimes Regulation was substantially diluted is extremely unfortunate. With ominous reports emerging of extrajudicial killings by the army in its Rah-e-Rast Operation in Swat (see here and here), another ethical and human rights crisis is the last thing it should be courting.

17 crore dillon ki shanaakht

2009-08-15T00:48:00.000-07:00

Distinguished economist and historian Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence was a very timely book. Published in 2006, it came just a few years after George W. Bush fashioned himself as a trigger-happy Christian crusader and launched his War on Terror. The world in those days was seen mostly through Samuel Huntington's clash of civilization lens and the "Western civilization" and "Muslim civilization" were considered in a most fundamental way to be mutually exclusive and mutually antagonistic.

Sen's point was simple. It is fallacious to categorize people solely by religious affiliation. To see the world only as a federation of religions is to overlook the individual's countless other identities. Sen enumerates some of his own as "an Asian, an Indian citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an economist, a dabbler in philosophy, an author, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights” (19) and so on. The insistence on the primacy of one identity, may it be racial or religious, is an old tactic of hate-mongers from Nazis to Hutu and Tutsi militants to Islamic fundamentalists. To ignore the plethora of other identities is to forego all the ways in which people can relate across the so-called civilizational divide. What Sen says is nothing new. In fact it is extremely obvious. But in all the acrimony that followed the 9/11 attacks, many had lost sight of this simple truth.

When I picked up Identity and Violence last week to reread it, it hit me how far the world has come since Bush's disastrous first term as president. The war on terror paradigm and Samuel Huntington are now in the junk pile of history. Obama, a man with astoundingly diverse identities (a biracial American with Kenyan and British heritage, raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, a Christian, a man married to an African American woman, a lawyer, a technophile, a community organizer and so on) is now at the helm of the world. The talk of the day is not war but rapprochement and reconciliation with the Muslim world. It is now obvious to most that Muslims do not inevitably sympathize with terrorists. And with the recent national consensus behind the army operation in Swat, this has become obvious to Pakistanis about themselves too. But in a lot of ways, Sen's book is still extremely relevant today when our Pakistani identity remains narrowly defined as the negative of the West, India and other exogenous and endogenous perceived threats.

These past few weeks, in the wake of Gojra, Pakistanis have been immersed in serious debate about our identities. The problem is an old one and with our country's 62nd anniversary over yesterday, we are not much closer to effecting a solution. I say effecting because the solution has been apparent for a long time, even as early as 1947. It will not do to straitjacket 170 million individuals with an artificially fashioned national identity (male, Urdu-speaking, Muslim). Pakistani identity must be broadened to include the varied identities of its citizens. Pakistan should not seek to define its citizens but its citizens should define what it means to be Pakistani.

In this respect there has been a lot of criticism of the Blasphemy Law of late. Some commentators are calling not only for its repeal but also for a secular Pakistani state. Secular government gets a lot of flak in Pakistan as being anti-religion but in reality it only means that the state is religion-blind, treating citizens of all religious identities equally and protecting the religious freedom of everyone.

Many advocates of a secular state quote Quaid-e-Azam's inaugural speech to the Pakistan Constituent Assembly. But the most impassioned and articulate defense of secular government in Pakistan remains Sris Chandra Chattopadhyaya’s who was the opposition leader of our first Constituent Assembly. In his speech during the Objectives Resolution debate of March 1949 Chattopadhyaya said:

"Let us eliminate the complexes of majority and minority. Let us treat citizens of Pakistan members of one family and frame such a constitution as may not break this tie so that all communities may stand shoulder to shoulder on equal footing in time of need and danger. I do not consider myself as a member of the minority community. I consider myself as one of seven crores of Pakistanis. Let me have to retain that privilege.

In other words, Chattopadhyaya envisioned a state where Pakistani identity was not defined to exclude non-dominant religious groups.

But a secular state while going a long way in solving our identity crisis will probably not go far enough. What is really needed is a redefinition of pakistaniat not just in the constitution but also in the minds of the Pakistani people. Here once again the state has to take responsibility because its textbooks are the widest and most effective method of disseminating an understanding of the Pakistani identity.

Those marginalized by the narrow definition of pakistaniat (women and individuals belonging to non-dominant linguistic, ethnic and religious groups) must have their identities accommodated in the larger Pakistani identity. What our schools and textbooks should teach our children is that (A) citizens of our country have multifarious identities that must all be respected and celebrated and (B) that these identities are in total harmony with being Pakistani. A Hindu, a woman, an English speaker, an atheist, a Brahui speaker are all equally Pakistani.

The monolithic way in which history is taught must be changed. Pakistan’s history is not a straight line from Muhammad bin Qasim to the Mughals to the Muslim League and then Pakistan. The importance of non-Muslim rulers needs to be highlighted, as do the regional histories of the provinces and the contributions made to our history, thought and culture by dissidents and also intellectuals and politicians opposed to the League (like Nehru and Gandhi). A history that is more representative of the histories of our people and less ideologically oriented against India and the West and towards the idea of a Muslim nation will go a long way in freeing our national identity and bringing it into line with the identities of our people

A few months back, the Citizens Archive of Pakistan organized the Shanaakht festival to highlight Pakistan’s diversity. It was just the kind of inclusionary event that we need to see but the slogan, “17 crore dillon ki aik shanaakht”, was somewhat disappointing in its implication that we are all Pakistanis despite of our differences rather than because of them. A much more appropriate maxim in my opinion would be: “17 crore shanaakht; aik Pakistan.”

The Writings of Maududi

2009-06-24T10:42:00.000-07:00

I've been reading the speeches of Abul Ala Maududi, the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami and a vocal proponent of a theocratic state in the early decades of Pakistan. His Islam is all about politics. The arrival of Islam in the ethos of the state is more important for him than its arrival in the hearts and lives of Muslims. This is mostly because he believes that once the state is Islamic, it can compel Muslims to be righteous. In this attitude he sets aside the centuries-old tradition of patient and laborious preaching to convince Muslims to bring their lives into accordance with Islamic injunctions. Instead he chooses the easier alternative of harnessing the modern state with its wide reach to force morality on Muslims. In doing so he underestimates the value of free will and forgets that Muslims must be righteous to please God, not out of fear of the state.

Maududi also talks at great length about intermediaries usurping religious authority and inserting themselves between God and His subjects. Islam has no priesthood is his mantra. But he seems to have no problem in interpreting Islam for mass consumption and in expecting everyone to follow it, if not because of the substance of his thought than on penalty of the ire of his Islamic state.

Sunday Advertisements. Dawn 14 January 1951

2009-03-13T08:52:00.000-07:00

RPAF Recruitment Ad. Dawn 10 January 1951

2009-03-13T08:51:00.001-07:00

Okhla Cafe Ad. Dawn 9 January 1951

2009-03-13T08:44:00.000-07:00

B.P. Bread Ad. Dawn 7 January 1951

2009-03-13T08:43:00.001-07:00

Horlicks Ad. Dawn 10 January 1951

2009-03-13T08:41:00.000-07:00

Advertisements from the 50s

2009-03-13T08:15:00.000-07:00

I was looking at microfiche of the Dawn from the 50s. The advertisements were kinda great. I scanned a few and am putting them up here.

Imran Khan vs Charles Darwin

2009-01-17T03:20:00.000-08:00

by Irfan Hussain

(from his weekly column in Dawn)

THIS year will see a large number of celebrations at campuses and scientific institutions around the world to mark the 200th year of the birth of Charles Darwin, and the 150th year of the publication of his seminal work.

Widely regarded as one of the three most influential thinkers of the 19th century, together with Freud and Marx, Darwin has had a stronger impact on our thinking than the other two giants of the era. Since its publication in 1859, his explanation of how life evolved on the planet has been subjected to rigorous criticism and analysis. Generations of scientists have tested it in the field and in the laboratory. And to date, it remains the only scientific explanation of how life on Earth has developed over the millennia.

Many religious people have viewed the Darwinian theory of evolution as an attack on their faith. Others have reconciled belief in a supernatural being controlling events in the universe with a scientific theory that pulls together a vast plethora of evidence. Whatever one’s position on the truth of Darwin’s revolutionary exposition, it would take a foolhardy person to dismiss it as a ‘half-baked theory’ as Imran Khan has done recently.

Titled Why the West craves materialism and why the East sticks to religion, the essay is dated Nov 8, 2008, and was sent to me via email by a reader. In this article, the politician and ex-cricketer describes his personal journey from the westernised, secular outlook of his youth to his present faith-based worldview.

In a sense, Imran Khan’s view of Darwin’s life work captures the essence of our backwardness. By rejecting a vast body of scientific research and analysis as ‘half-baked’, he exposes his own ignorance. He is, of course, entitled to his own opinion on any subject under the sun. But as he is a role model for many young Pakistanis, he has a duty to choose his words with greater care. He may refuse to accept the consensus behind Darwinian theory in the international scientific community, but to dismiss it out of hand risks influencing impressionable young minds into following him.

As it is, there is not a single world-class university or research institute in the Muslim world. The reason for this is not hard to find. By refusing to accept and internalise the rational method of empirical research and analysis, we discourage and suppress scientific and objective scholarship.

In Imran Khan’s mind, as in many others, reason is a western monopoly. So anyone using rational analysis as a tool is dismissed as ‘western’, a pejorative term deployed to undermine any argument. Unfortunately, this widespread trend has had profound significance over the centuries. By ceding scientific research and progress to the West, Muslims find themselves in their current predicament. By contrast, countries like China, Japan and Korea have made tremendous progress by accepting reason as the basis of their education and public discourse. So when Imran Khan says ‘the East sticks to religion’ in the title of his essay, he is effectively ignoring well over half the East.

I have long admired Imran Khan for his cricketing prowess, as well as for the fine work he has done in creating Pakistan’s first cancer hospital. So as a fan, it has saddened me to see him in the constant company of right-wingers like ex-ISI chief Hamid Gul and Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the leader of the Jamaat-i-Islami. On TV talk shows, where he is a frequent guest, he has been voicing the most extreme views. Let me hasten to say that I would defend his right to his opinions, but as a hero to millions of young Pakistanis, I would ask that these views be based on logic and facts.

Imran Khan has complained in his article that Pakistan’s secular elites do not study Islam, and hence they are seduced by ‘western’ thinking. I’m afraid this is based on the arrogant assumption that simply because people dress in a certain way, they are ignorant of their own culture, history and religion. According to him, Pakistan is polarised between this group who “react strongly to anyone trying to impose Islam on society”, and religious extremists. Personally speaking, I don’t want any belief or dogma imposed on society. As a secularist, I think everybody should be free to believe in any faith. And in the distinguished company of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, I feel that religion should have nothing to do with the business of the state.

So why is it that today, only Muslim nations seem to deny the validity of the scientific method? It is true that many evangelical Christians reject Darwinian theory as well, and push creationism as the explanation for the development of life on earth. Recently, this extreme position has been replaced by something called Intelligent Design. But among educated people, it would be difficult to find many who close their eyes to the insights contained in Darwin’s groundbreaking research, even though many of these ideas were developed by Wallace, a contemporary of Darwin’s.

In his important book Muslims and Science published nearly 20 years ago, Pervez Hoodbhoy made the point that the entire output of scientific papers written in the Muslim world every year did not equal those produced in Israel alone. This remains true two decades later. And the reason for this imbalance lies in the position reflected in Imran Khan’s views about Darwin.

If we do not encourage the young to think and reason for themselves, how can we expect them to discover anything new? The essence of scientific enquiry lies in curiosity about how the world works, how matter was formed, and how life came into being. Perhaps curiosity about the universe is what sets mankind apart from the animal kingdom.

But if, as Darwin was in the Galapagos Isles, we are struck with wonder when we see something for which we have no explanation, then we have taken a step towards discovering more about our universe, and ultimately, about ourselves.

irfan.husain@gmail.com

Postscript: I don't usually copy paste other people's writings wholesale on my blog, but I read Hussain's column and found it so refreshingly intelligent, outspoken and relevant that I just had to put it up here. Last month, an article in LiveScience cited a 2007 survey by Riaz Hassan in which he found that only 14% Pakistanis agreed with the statement that Darwin's theory of evolution is probably or certainly true. In such a dire situation, our politicians should not be pandering to ignorance nor should they feed this virulent rejection of rationalism that has become Pakistanis' facile but self-destructive reaction to our beleaguered position in the world today.

Don't you just love this country...

2009-01-15T11:26:00.000-08:00

It is half past twelve in the night and someone has been firing a machine gun on the street outside my house for the past twenty minutes. What the hell is wrong with people!

Multiculturalism and the Court of Zafar

2009-01-14T01:04:00.000-08:00

Reading William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal, I was struck by how much more complex the events of 1857 were than is taught in school. The common impression that it was a Mughal/Muslim rebellion against the aggressively expansionary British with little or no Hindu involvement is firmly routed by Dalrymple's more nuanced picture.

He describes 1857 as "a very odd sort of religious war, where a Muslim emperor [Zafar] was pushed into rebellion against his Christian oppressors [the British] by a mutinous army of overwhelmingly Hindu sepoys, who came to him of their own free will (and initially against his) to ask for the barakat of a Muslim blessing and the leadership of the Mughal they regarded as their legitimate ruler."

The book highlights the disconnectedness of our modern, religiously and ideologically-monolithic reinterpretation of 1857. The fact that the army raised to suppress the uprising in Delhi, comprised mostly of Pathan and Punjabi Muslims further drives home how little the pan-Islamic creed, so popular today, applied to the subcontinent of 1857.

In fact, Zafar and his court were exemplars of tolerance and multiculturalism. He celebrated Holi, Dussera and Diwali along with the Muslim festivals. His court diaries mention how Zafar refused to see a Hindu who wanted to convert to Islam as he thought it improper. And when his physician, Dr Chaman Lal, converted to Christianity and the city's ulema clamored for Lal's dismissal from the Emperor's service, "Zafar had replied that the doctor's faith was his own private matter and 'there was no cause for shame in what he had done.'"

When on 19 May, eight days after the rebellion started in Delhi, Orthodox Delhi mullahs tried to turn the rebellion into an exclusively Muslim holy war by putting up a declaration of jihad on the Jama Masjid, "Zafar immediately ordered it to be taken down 'because such a display of fanaticism would only tend to exasperate the Hindus.'"

It was the arrival of hardcore Wahabi jihadis from outside Delhi that threatened the communal harmony so crucial to Delhi and the rebellion itself. On Eidul Azha, the jihadis quite impertinently decided to sacrifice not sheep or goats but cows, to deliberately offend the Hindu population. They planned to do so in the open grounds in front of the Jama Masjid. The threat, however, of imminent civil war because of such an incendiary action was staved off by Zafar who immediately and decisively banned cow slaughter.

Rallies Cheering Osama bin Laden in Pakistan?

2009-01-11T23:18:00.000-08:00

It boggles my mind that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict happening a thousand miles away from Pakistan has brought Pakistanis onto the street to cheer the very man who has inspired (if not directly orchestrated) around one hundred and fifty suicide attacks on Pakistanis in the past six years. That just doesn't make sense to me.

20 things I want of my government

2009-01-02T00:36:00.000-08:00

It's easy to watch this government stumble through its first year in power and criticize everything it does. But the other day I wondered whether instead I could come up with a list of things I expect from the government, a sort of political agenda of my own. I don't expect that many things on this list will come about but that isn't really the point.

I have realized over time that Pakistanis expect vastly different things from their government. Some want the government to leave us entirely alone, others want it to impose their particular morality on everyone else and yet others want it to provide each and everything in life to them. In sharing my expectations of the government, I am hoping that others will share theirs too. I am extremely curious about what most Pakistanis would like to see from our government. And maybe, just perhaps, someone in the government might be curious too...?

Without much further ado, my list:

Repeal of the Eighth Amendment
Decentralization of power to the provincial and district levels, including the power to raise taxes, enact laws and manage subjects
Depoliticization and modernization of the police force, including better training in crime investigation, public relations and gender sensitization
An end to capital punishment
An end to torture
A comprehensive disaster management plan for all the cities of Pakistan
Making only one law-enforcement agency responsible for protecting Pakistanis agaisnt terrorism
A decisive victory in FATA, Swat, Buner, Dera Ismail Khan and other places where the army is involved
More civilian control over the army and more oversight and transparency in its budget-making
Swift increase in our electricity generation capacity and a long-term plan to ensure that power supply keeps up with demand
Cheap and efficient public transport in all cities
Enough government schools, teachers and teacher training institutes to guarantee state of the art primary and secondary education to all Pakistani children
Streamlining and modernizing the syllabi of madrassahs
Stringent consumer protection laws and consumer courts
Laws against sexual harrassment in the workplace and against domestic violence
A social security net for the poor, including food stamps and a bureau to help Pakistanis find work and train them for jobs
Government health clinics in rural areas
Provision of electricity to every village in Pakistan
Modernization and expansion of Pakistan's railway system
It complete its five year term and facilitate free and fair elections at the end of its tenure.

Reporting Biases

2008-12-29T22:55:00.000-08:00

News in Dawn, the New York Times and the Guardian on the latest chapter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict really shows how subjective and partisan reporting can be.

All three papers give the number of Palestinian casualties in the first paragraph, putting it around 350, but the New York Times, in the very same breath clarifies that according to the UN only some 60 of those Palestinians were civilians. The Guardian mentions that in the third para while Dawn much later both emphasizing that these numbers are thought to be very conservative.

All three list the places Israelis attacked (the Islamic University, the Interior Ministry and the presidential guesthouse). The NYTimes is quick to explain that Israel considers these places Hamas' civic institutions. A strange assertion. I would say that the Interior Ministry in Gaza is Gazan's civi institution not just the Hamas'. The Guardian calls the Islamic University "the territory's main university and one with links to Hamas". It also lists the damage to laboratories in the university. Dawn just notes that the university is a "significant cultural symbol in Gaza".

Then NYTimes spends over a 100 words describing the Hamas rocketfire and each of the four killed Israelis. It also paints a vivid picture of "thousands of Israelis huddled in shelters". Dawn spends 25 words to say that two Israelis have been killed by rocketfire since Israeli attacks starts. It mentions that "Israel has said" that it has launched its attack because of intensifying rocketfiring but undercuts that assertion with a note in the same sentence about Israeli national elections approaching.

After describing the Israeli's plight, the NYTimes spends around 40 words describing the Palestinian's situation, but in that same paragraph, in the very next line starts to talk about how Hamas has been shooting Palestinians too on the charge that they were collaborators. It then spends a huge chunk of the article describing these executions by Hamas and only then describes civilian casualties of Israeli bombings. Dawn and the Guardian do not report any such killings by Hamas.

The NYTimes does not note Ban Ki-Moon's opposition to the Israeli attack at all while the Guardian quotes him extensively, including his condemnation of Israel's "excessive use of force".

There are at least a dozen more smaller differences between the three articles but these in themselves make the NYTimes' pro-Israeli and Dawn and the Guardian's pro-Palestinian biases clear. I am sure there has been no falsification of information but the choices of inclusion, omission and organization make all the difference in giving these reports their slants.

Sitting in Karachi, I cannot really determine where the reality of things lies — between the poles of these three news reports or beyond them. And without wanting to spark off an epistemological controversy, I wonder whether the reality is entirely knowable at all. Perhaps, all that is needed of us news readers is the awareness that news outlets report not the reality of things but their version of reality, seen consciously or subconsciously, through the filter of their biases.

Palestine and Israel

2008-12-29T22:01:00.000-08:00

Once again, Israel and Palestine's uneasy truce has fallen apart and innocent civilians on both sides are paying with their lives. Four Israelis, 3 of whom were civilians, and 365 Palestinians, 60 of whom were civilians, lost their lives in the violence. It is a gruesome reminder that one of the gravest conflicts of our times is still very much alive and destroying the lives of many, many innocent people on both sides.

Both the Jewish and Islamic traditions subscribe to an eye for an eye justice. But Israeli response to Hamas rocket-firing has been disproportionate. 365 lives for 4. According to their own traditions, that leaves them with a debit of 361.

But violence cannot be stopped by more violence. It is the hard truth that people and governments of our times are yet to learn. But even in today's extremely grim situation, I find myself sincerely hoping – against all hope – for a swift resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and for lasting peace in the Middle East.

Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan says it is not against girls' education – Dawn

2008-12-26T22:08:00.000-08:00

I guess they just burn down girls schools for sport then...

All of a sudden, TTP has discovered that girls education is not against their religion. All they really want is that girls at school be forced into wearing the burqa, irrespective of the girls' individual opinions on the matter. Is that really too much to ask?

This seems to me to be part of TTP's effort to become more mainstream. They seem to have realized that education is something people want and burning schools is not really winning them any hearts or minds. So they maneuver and back-peddle on their 'unshakeable' beliefs and values. They are acting more and more like a political rather than a militant entity.

Consider another piece of news in today's Dawn: "Talking on phone from an unspecified place Maulvi Omar, a spokesman for TTP, said: “It is our (Taliban’s) responsibility to protect the country’s western border and we will stop infiltrations into Afghanistan.”"

The irony of this statement is mind-boggling. The bandits are promising to police the town when the sheriff leaves. What kind of approach is this? On any other day, we would love to blow you freedom-loving Islam-hating Pakistanis to smithereens but hey today we are ready to pitch in in your fight against India...?

This is politicking in the extreme. And the ease with which they have switched from government-toppling terror-spreading rebels to qaumi janda-waving tarana-singing patriots is evidence of such hypocrisy that would cause even our most adroitly two-faced lota politicians to gape.

I really hope no one is buying this bag of bull that the TTP is feeding.

Useless!

2008-12-21T21:27:00.001-08:00

Everyone understands that the security barriers that people install on their streets are because they feel the police cannot protect them. Since all this fuss has been made by the government about how the barriers impede movement of fire engines, ambulances and police vehicles, it is also clear to everyone that they prevent these emergency workers from doing their jobs.

So since everyone knows why the barriers are up and why they are a problem, then the government should just go ahead and solve the problem if they want the barriers to come down. To force people to take the barriers down without taking concrete steps to better protect them is unreasonable. We all know how miserably useless and entirely self-serving our police force is. If they can revamp their image from corrupt, high-handed and brutal to efficient, respectful and dedicated, Karachiites will be more than happy to take the barriers down. We will be on Cloud 9, in fact.

But the government has no intentions of sincerely addressing the systemic problems that plague our law-enforcement personnel (poor payment, understaffing, poor training, lack of equipment, lack of gender sensitization, politicization of the police force, unmerited appointments and the list goes on and on). It is happy just kicking up a big fuss over this one issue and making headlines in the city pages for a week. Then it's all back to business as usual.

In the aftermath

2008-12-21T10:52:00.000-08:00

Despite caution from a lot of Indian intellectuals, India has been drifting down the same dark path that America did after 9/11. All the bloodthirsty commentating, the growing xenophobia, the draconian security laws under consideration, the obsession with what happened to the glitterati at the Oberoi and the Taj as opposed to the victims at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus: it all leaves me with a queasy feeling of things going in the wrong direction.

Latest in the series of missteps is the Oberoi Trident saying that it will not entertain Pakistani nationals at its hotel. The move is distasteful, misguided, vindictive and short-sighted. It does not entirely surprise me, but it certainly does sadden. The India-Pakistan-bhai-bhai enthusiasm of the past five years has shown itself to have been both superficial and hollow. Within days of the Mumbai attack, all that goodwill evaporated and the Pakistani and Indian media were at each other's throats; sports tournaments were cancelled; the peace process put on hold and the deep mistrust and antipathy that lay dormant for the past few years resurfaced with renewed vigour.

It is a shame. What happened in Mumbai was in no uncertain terms a tragedy. And of all the people who could empathize, Pakistanis were on top of the list for having been battered on a weekly basis by terrorist attacks for the past five years. But instead of sharing each other's sorrow and using our new cordial relationship to go after those responsible for the attacks together, leaders and citizens on both side ran to take cover behind their old jingoism and bellicose rhetoric. A dozen hate-filled twenty-somethings have managed to alter the open nature of a country of over a billion people and derail the growing friendship between millions of citizens of the estranged nations. It's a shame. A real shame.

Hey, lazybones!

2008-12-20T12:22:00.000-08:00

"If you have trouble getting started and have a tendency to sit down and look at a blank sheet of paper and an hour later you’re still sitting and it’s still blank, you need us.

"When the deadline is near at hand and you feel neither motivated nor inspired and then you have procrastinated until you have reached the point where you absolutely have to write and are developing feelings of anxiety that make it harder to start the next time, don't you feel that it's the time to call us!

"We will take the pressure off meeting the deadlines for grades. We have created a whole file of ideas and can handle your essays. You can place your confidence in our ability to write your assignments.

"Our writing has a defined purpose and our writing is much more than just correct writing we make a clear point and support it with information. The information is clearly connected, the words are appropriate. You can rely on a professional expert to do the job for you. We also write with taste and good judgment."

This is the proud declaration on a website offering to write essays in English for students in Pakistan for high school, undergraduate, graduate and PhD programs. A high school student can get a paper written in 24 hours for as much as 400 rupees per page. A PhD candidate can get a paper in 24 hours for 900 rupees per page.

The website further says, rather sleazily, "We are aware of the fact that some academicians denounce their students for taking resort to writing services. Although we believe that it hardly creates a difference to a student’s progression if he takes support from a justifiable and specialized writing service, in today’s highly competitive environment. We protect your information, never disclosing any of your information under any circumstance. 100% confidentiality is our guarantee."

I don't know what to be more dismayed at: the fact that there is a website offering such ethically and morally bankrupt services, the fact that if enough people get wind of this website it could well be a roaring success in our ethically and morally bankrupt country or just the horrendously poor English on display on this website. Please note the convoluted run-on sentences, the redundancy and the inept usage of idioms. "A professional expert"? "The deadline is near at hand..." Elsewhere on the website, they have spelt rupee as "ruppee".

I wouldn't trust these nincompoops to write even a text message for me. I hope others will have the integrity and, failing that, the commonsense to refrain from using this website too.

Note to Karachi Drivers

2008-12-20T00:54:00.000-08:00

When you hear an ambulance wailing somewhere behind you, please, please don't just continue to sit at the red light. When a man is having a heart attack or a woman a stroke in the ambulance behind you, the traffic laws are temporarily held in abeyance for that person's life. So people when you hear an ambulance, make way for it, break lights to clear the path for it or stop even if your light is green so that the ambulance on the other road can go past.

In case you were not aware of this before, please know that not only is it okay to disobey traffic laws to let an ambulance pass, it is in fact required, ethically and (hopefully) legally too.

Just now, I had to wait for two painful minutes at the Teen Talwar signal with an ambulance behind me desperate to drive through. But there were dozens of cars ahead of us that just would not break the light. All of a sudden, the usually cavalier drivers of Karachi turned into stubborn traffic light observers. They sat there oblivious to the ambulance siren and the honks of several conscientious drivers and moved only when the light turned green. Of course, the ever present traffic police did nothing either. They were busy fleecing some poor motorcyclist in a corner.

As the ambulance whizzed past, I saw the face of an extremely worried young boy inside and I could only hope that his relative lying there next to him would make it to the hospital in time. If that person does survive, it certainly won't be thanks to any of us at the Teen Talwar signal, but if that person doesn't make it, their death will certainly be on all our hands.

Consult a dictionary first, buddy

2008-12-17T11:38:00.000-08:00

The esteemed Council of Islamic Ideology has declared the term "gender equality" vague and un-Islamic in its review of the National Commission for Status of Women Ordinance 2000. My first reaction to this news article in yesterday's Dawn was, "Lol!"

Is the term un-Islamic because it is vague? If the CII was unsure about what gender equality meant it should have asked for some clarification from the government, or better yet, from anyone with a dictionary. Instead, after deeming the term ambiguous, it goes on to find it un-Islamic on the grounds that men and women are anatomically, physically and mentally different.

Now I guess I should follow my own advice and put forward some points for clarification from the CII (just in case it frequents this blog).

1. What does the non-indentical biology of men and women have to do with ensuring that the government and the law's treatment of men and women and their access to opportunities is identical?

2. Going by your reasoning, will you also be recommending dissimilar treatment by the state and the law for people who are physically or mentally dissimilar, for people with more or less limbs and higher or lower IQs for example?

3. And if you do intend to discriminate against people with low IQs, will you be recommending to the government that it kick idiots like yourselves off advisory bodies which get so much media attention? That sure would be nice!

Sir Syed Ahmed Khan

2008-12-14T08:48:00.000-08:00

"In whose hands shall the administration and the empire of India rest? Now, suppose that the English community and the army were to leave India, taking with them all their cannons and their splendid weapons and all else, who then would be the rulers of India? Is it possible that under these circumstances two nations – the Mohammedans and the Hindus – could sit on the same throne and remain equal in power? Most certainly not. It is necessary that one of them should conquer the other. To hope that both could remain equal is to desire the impossible and the inconceivable. At the same time you must remember that although the number of Mohammedans is less than that of the Hindus, and although they contain far fewer people who have received a higher English education, yet they must not be considered insignificant or weak. Probably they would by themselves be enough to maintain their own position. But suppose they were not. Then our Musalman brothers, the Pathans, would come out as a swarm of locusts from their mountain valleys, and make rivers of blood flow from their frontier on the north to the extreme end of Bengal. This thing – who after the departure of the English would be conquerors would rest on God's will. But until one nation has conquered the other and made it obedient, peace cannot reign in the land." – Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (Meerut, 16 March 1888)

This speech by Sir Syed was made three years after the Indian National Congress was founded. If you remember your Pak Studies, then you must know that Sir Syed was extremely opposed to the INC, believing, somewhat irrationally, that it was a conduit for Hindu supremacy.

What really surprised me about this speech was not how easily and firmly Sir Syed dismissed the idea of Hindu-Muslim unity over fifty years before the Pakistan Resolution, but how extremely aggressive he was. This talk about making blood flow and about making the other nation obedient makes him sound less like a progressive intellectual and more like a firebrand. It doesn't quite jibe with his image as a reformer that we Pakistanis have, but makes him sound queasily close to the religious fanatics of today.

The Lucky Irani Circus

2008-12-14T08:43:00.000-08:00

It has been in town for the past two months, in the field outside Aladdin Park. It is now up in the Clifton Beach Park for the next week. If you have an hour to kill over this week, I strongly recommend that you check it out. They have everything from contortionists to trapeze artists to clowns and midgets. One of the performances involved a young girl climbing a twenty feet ladder that was balanced on a man's forehead. She climbed to the top, took a bow and climbed down, while the man balanced the ladder without his hands. Scariest thing ever!

It's Eid again...

2008-12-09T02:34:00.000-08:00

I don't know why Muslim holidays can't be spread out more evenly. Didn't we just celebrate Eid ul Fitr? It seems like only yesterday when the entire country was starving itself and now it is slaughtering cows, goats and camels by the hundreds of thousands for a big feast.

I just saw a white Corolla leading a camel down 26th Street. The camel was tied to its rear bumper and the Corolla was moving at snail's pace (or should I say camel's pace) in front of it. Only in Pakistan, I say, only in Pakistan.

A bearded man with glasses and a skull cap was sitting in the open trunk along with two young boys, whose excited eyes were glued to the languidly moving camel. I have to admit the animal was very cute. Unfortunately, by now it is probably flailing around in a pool of its own blood, dying of a slit throat, and serving as the centerpiece of some upper middle class family's unnecessarily barbaric ritual of obeisance to its "Most Merciful and Most Kind" god.

I really don't like this holiday.

What I really mean by education

2008-12-06T11:26:00.000-08:00

Remember those hypotheticals that your seventh grade school teacher asked you when she didn't have a teaching plan: "If there was one thing you could change about Pakistan, what would it be?" The twelve-year-old me's answer was invariably education: "I'd want all 170 million people of our country to be educated." Today, I would answer more specifically: "I'd want all 170 million people of our country to be able to read, write and think for themselves."

The Garage School (TGS) is an NGO that is working to make the twelve-year-old me's wish come true. TGS runs two primary schools in DHA, Karachi – one literally out of a garage – and provides free education to young boys and girls from the low-income Neelum and Shah Rasool Colonies. Excellent, excellent work, the twelve-year-old me would say, but after visiting TGS the 22-year-old me was only dismayed at the kind of education TGS is imparting to its students.

The emphasis of the school is entirely on discipline and rote learning. To impress me, a teacher asked the brightest student in her class to tell us what he knew about Pakistan. What followed was a verbatim recital of a passage from some textbook on Pakistan. In a breathless monologue, the boy quoted, "As a Pakistani, it is our duty to worship God, respect our parents and love our countrymen. Pakistan is a great nation that was formed in 1947. It has four provinces. The first province is Punjab. Its capital is Lahore..." So on and so forth. Later, the entire class parroted, with some assistance from the science teacher, slogans against smoking cigarettes and chewing paan. The children were basically being mass-programmed to follow the values that the school thought appropriate.

I know, this happens here at the best private schools too. Schools like to produce obedient and disciplined students, who have just enough brainpower to regurgitate all the axioms they want to feed them but not enough to think independently or question anything, least of all the schools and their axioms.

But that isn't the kind of students that schools should be producing. It won't give us a population that can innovate and revolutionize or engage in rational debate, tolerate a diversity of opinions and adapt quickly to change. It will simply produce people who can read and write and at most hold a low level white collar job. Students deserve more than that; and we as a country need more than that. Much, much more.

Well isn't this a big relief!

2008-12-04T08:04:00.000-08:00

According to The News, "The Sindh coalition government has decided to revoke the Police Order-2002, and expressed a unanimous view that no political party was behind the recent ethnic violence in Karachi, and only those elements who did not want political reconciliation in the province were behind the mayhem."

Well, isn't that just dandy. How nice to know that after the riots in which 50 Karachiites were murdered, the government has vindicated every political party of all blame. What a relief that our irreproachable political parties were not responsible. And how very shocking it is to learn that those who were responsible – these unnamed spectral elements, who will surely be caught and tried in public very very soon – were actually out to sabotage our poor helpless political parties' big group hug moment.

Shucks! Lead me to a polling booth so I can vote this unfairly victimized government right back into power.

Rumors

2008-12-01T12:41:00.000-08:00

The rumor is that Karachi is up in flames because of some MQM-Pathan tussle over land around some new expressway.

The rumor is that the police, which has received shoot to kill orders from Sindh's Interior Minister Zulfiqar Mirza, is standing by as activists of political parties shoot people down in front of them.

The rumor is that this was all planned well ahead of time, with months of hysterical talk about Talibanization of Karachi, which sought to blur the distinction between Pathans and the Taliban.

The rumor is that Pathan students from some college in Karachi were asked to leave. When they didn't people put Elfi super glue in their eyes, ears and noses.

The rumor is that there are people out for blood slicing ears off people of other ethnicities for no reason other than, well, their ethnicity.

The rumor is that some men broke into an Urdu-speaking colony – Raees Amrohvi Colony in Orangi – entered a house and shot everyone inside.

These are all rumors, unverified stories that are spreading like wildfire across the terrorized city while our glorious media is busily giving us a minute by minute run through of what happened in Mumbai five days back. The best that the media can give us about what is happening in our own backyard is the following:

"Members of two ethnic communities [notice how the ethnic communities are not even named] went on a rampage and attacked each other." Dawn (01/12/2008)

The Daily Times talks repeatedly and vaguely about "miscreants" wreaking havoc in the city in yesterday's paper regurgitating the rumors that are circulating in the city.

From all this it would seem that, much like in some B-grade horror flick, an entire city has suddenly lost its mind and is going around mindlessly killing each other. Any kind of insight into why the riots started, who is behind it and why the law-enforcement agencies are unable to stop it is apparently too much to expect from both the government and the media.

Meanwhile, there are more rumors about why mum is currently the word. The rumor is that the media is terrified of the MQM. That after the MQM censored Geo twice over the past month or so, it has decided to not stick its neck out.

The rumor is that since most of the big media outlets' head offices are in Karachi, they prefer not to piss the MQM off.

The rumor is that the MQM made certain that another episode of May 12-like heroic reporting would not occur and that the ransacking of Aaj's office is still too fresh in the media heads' minds to offer more incisive reporting.

The rumor is that the troubles are in such out of the way areas of Karachi – Orangi, Sohrab Goth, Banaras etc – that for cameramen to go out there would be like going into Fata. Therefore, the TV coverage of the riots is also minimal.

In the meantime, the death toll climbs up each day, as violence collects more half-lived lives.

In the meantime, as rumors and bloodthirsty rioters overrun the streets of Karachi, we, the ever-stoic and ever-ignored people of Karachi, stay quietly in our homes hoping for yet another crisis to quickly loosen its grip on our beloved yet battered city so that we may pick up our lives again and guiltily thank our stars that it wasn't our turn this time around.

Reason is not automatic

2008-11-13T22:11:00.000-08:00

"Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone." – Ayn Rand in the introduction to Atlas Shrugged.

Admission is the First Step

2008-11-13T21:31:00.000-08:00

Zardari was very impressive in his address at the UN Interfaith Conference. Despite spending half the speech effusively praising the Saudi King, he did admit – though very briefly – that Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are both serious problems that need to be dealt with. His exact words were:

"Bigotry manifested in Islamophobia and anti-Semitism must be combatted."

Yes, he mentioned anti-Semitism only once, but implicit in the lumping together of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism was the idea that they are two sides of the same coin. The West's Islamophobia and the Muslim world's anti-Semitism are both a result of grievously mishandled geopolitics in the absence of meaningful people to people interaction.

Muslim anti-Semitism is based solely on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Muslims never had anything against the Jewish faith. In fact, while anti-Semitism raged in Europe and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Muslim world gave protection to Jews. Now, however, Jew is a dirty word in places like Pakistan. Synagogues have been burnt down in Karachi, the old Jewish cemetery desecrated and Jews – South Asian Jews mind you – have been run out of the country. Pakistani hatred of Jews is blind and overwhelming and rests on the false premise that Israel and individual Jews are the same.

The West's Islamophobia rests on the same misconception: the Muslim terrorists and the rest of the Muslim world are the same. Hate crimes against Muslims in America and Europe have been on the increase. In the US presidential elections, the label of Muslim was used almost as a slur on Obama, and the most revealing thing about it was that his Muslim middle name, Hussein, was a big concern for Americans.

Yet Americans acknowledge their problem and many in the liberal media try to fight Islamophobia. But in Pakistan, anti-Semitism has never been challenged by the media, intellectuals or politicians. Zardari's admission of the problem is a first step. His proposed solution, which followed the admission also seems to be in the right direction:

"Dialogue, and not discord, between civilizations and faiths must be encouraged... Let us not isolate people, let us engage people."

It is vague but it is something. Of course it would have been infinitely better if Zardari had said this to the Pakistani people and not a bunch of diplomats and world leaders and talked a little more specifically and extensively about anti-Semitism. There is a rumor that he might meet Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres at one of the dinners. I for one hope he does. I hope that Pakistanis are allowed to go to Israel and Israelis allowed to come to Pakistan. Getting to know each other as human beings as opposed to demonic caricatures will only further the mission for tolerance for which all these distinguished persons have gathered at the UN this week.

Order (I)

2008-11-12T21:58:00.000-08:00

More pictures from my visit to the Shahjehan Mosque can be viewed on my Flickr profile.

Order (II)

2008-11-12T03:13:00.000-08:00

This weekend, I went to see the Shahjehan Mosque at Thatta. Everyone must have seen pictures of it in coffee table books about Pakistan, but seeing it in real life was a profound and beautiful experience. I sat in one of the nooks in the covered courtyard for nearly an hour mesmerized by the infinite geometry of the arches and tiles. Tracing the order of the architecture was the most therapeutic thing I had done in months; it felt like all the mundane anxieties left my mind and all the tension drained from my body.

Shielded from the relentless sun, enjoying the cool breeze that circulated through the quiet courtyard, I thought about how important order is to the quality of our lives. The daily traffic jams, the near accidents when some asshole breaks a traffic light or some pedestrian with a deathwish darts in front of your car, the general chaos of Karachi takes an immense toll on people. The unnecessry honking, the inconsiderate cutting of a line at the nanwallah, the need to yell to get the grocer's attention, the neighbours dumping their trash outside your house, it all builds up slowly in our body and mind. It is betrayed by that tension in our shoulder, our sharp reply to someone's innocent question, the unconscious gnashing of ours teeth, that nervous shaking of our legs and most importantly by that slowburning anger – or alternately – leaden fatigue that characterizes our existence.

This Mughal architecture in the middle of Thatta seemed to comprehend our need for order, for the psychological comfort it affords. To be part of an ordered regulated society and to live in an ordered regulated space where the law of the jungle and ruthless self-interest are held in check by laws and institutions – both government and civil – that function effectively, without favour or prejudice, that is my hopelessly idealistic dream for Karachi, for Pakistan, which the Shahjehan Mosque anticipated 400 years ago.

Lashkars

2008-11-08T07:39:00.000-08:00

Since September, the newspapers have been awash with news about pro-government jirgas and lashkars being assembled by tribesmen in various areas of FATA to resist the Taliban. This is good in that after nearly seven years, the locals are taking a firm stance against the militants, whom they initially treated with much hospitality. Support of the people of FATA will be key to success in what has now become a full-fledged war on the militants there. The locals' knowledge of the area and the simple fact that they will no longer give refuge to militants will help tremendously.

But this whole business of the lashkars fighting a proxy war for the government makes me very uncomfortable. Tackling the militants is the government and the military's responsibility and not of civilians living in that area. For the government to garner their support and make sure they are not harboring militants is one thing, but for it to use these armed tribesmen as a buffer against the ruthless militants is inhumane.

To make matters worse, not only is the government encouraging lashkars, it is, as the Herald reported this month, also arming them. Our experience of arming the mujahideen to fight the Soviets and the Taliban to fight in Kashmir should be proof enough of the folly of such endeavors. These groups that the state arms have a tendency of using those very arms against the state later. When the militants have been controlled, I am sure, the last thing we will want is to have to fight another war to check armed lashkars.

On a related note, I find it hard to be very enthusiastic about the so-called "vigilance committees" that have sprouted up in Buner. These committees are basically armed vigilante groups that guard villages in Buner against militants. The Herald speaks of these committees in glowing terms, calling them "a miracle" and encouraging people of Swat to follow suit and "become the masters of their own destiny". Such glorification of vigilante groups is quite unnecessary. They are a woeful symptom of the state's failure to protect its citizens and can become a threat to the state's authority. The media was right in condemning acts of vigilante justice in Karachi and in calling on the government and society to address its root causes. In an editorial, Dawn called the burning of robbers by civilians in Karachi a "terrifying new phenomenon". They should be consistent and do the same with the armed and organized vigilante groups in NWFP.

Ministerial Glut

2008-11-03T23:09:00.000-08:00

After the Feb 2008 elections, many of us had hoped for a change in governance and for a move away from nearly a decade of cronyism, corruption, ineptitude and failed government policies at the hands of Musharraf and the PML-Q. And while the new PPP government has brought new faces into power, it is continuing many of the old Musharraf-PML-Q government policies. It is certainly continuing the PML-Q tradition of appointing a legion of ministers, a practice which is both costly and unnecessary.

Yesterday, 40 new ministers were sworn in to the federal cabinet bringing the total to a whopping 55. This means that now 16 percent of the 342 members of the National Assembly are part of the cabinet. 53 percent (50 out of 94) of PPP MNAs are also now part of the cabinet.

Why does Pakistan need 55 cabinet members when a 15 member US cabinet governs a country of over 300 million people? The answer of course lies in the perks of being a cabinet member. While an MNA gets a monthly salary of 17,000 rupees, a Federal Minister gets 40,000 rupees and a Minister of State (a junior cabinet member) gets 37,000 rupees. Here are the other legal perks of belonging to the cabinet(1), (2):

Monthly payment of rent by the state up to 19,550 rupees and 17,825 rupees for official residences of Federal Ministers and Ministers of State, respectively;
Monthly payment of rent by the state up to 19,550 rupees and 17,825 rupees for personal residences of Federal Ministers and Ministers of State, respectively;
Monthly utility allowance of 15,000 rupees;
Daily allowance for gas and electricity of 550 rupees;
The free use of a 1600cc car for the minister and his/her family;
One free telephone line for the office and home, with free calls inside the country;
Subsidized air travel;
A one time 5,000 rupee equipment allowance;
A one time furnishing allowance with a maximum limit of 100,000 rupees;
An annual discretionary grant of 600,000 rupees and 400,000 rupees for Federal Ministers and Ministers of State, respectively.

There is of course the unquantifiable but surely not insignificant perk of bribes in holding a position in the cabinet, too.

Not counting the bribe or perks 5-10, the annual expense to the people of Pakistan for each Federal Minister is 1.33 million rupees and for each Minister of State is 1.25 million rupees.

No wonder everyone in the National Assembly wants a piece of this pie, and the PPP government seems more than happy to oblige. The facts that we are in a major fiscal crisis and that we desperately need to balance our government budget and stop government borrowing from the SBP to bring inflation down from over 30% seem to be lost on our government. It is very happy to withdraw subsidies from struggling Pakistanis and slash developmental expenditure for the sake of government frugality but sees no contradiction in feeding the greed of the ruling coalition's MNAs out of the taxpayer's pocket. Pakistanis will now be paying over 71.8 million rupees in salaries and perks to cabinet members every year.

This is a far cry from 15 August 1947, when a 6 member cabinet was sworn in under Liaquat Ali Khan. Instead, this expanded cabinet is shockingly reminiscent of Shaukat Aziz's 66 member whale of a cabinet.

Native Tongues

2008-11-01T23:16:00.000-07:00

I have lived in Pakistan for an overwhelming part of my life: nineteen out of twenty-two years. Yet my first language is English. I understand Urdu; I speak, read and write it, but I am just not as comfortable in Urdu as I am in English. It takes me long agonizing minutes to decipher just one sentence in Urdu newspapers and I speak Urdu searchingly, stumbling through the grammar and tripping over the diction. I think in English, write in English, read in English and am most expressive in English.

There are lots of people here who think that this makes me less Pakistani, less authentically native. I have always contended that that is utter nonsense. For one thing, Urdu is not the native language of a majority of Pakistanis. Balochi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Seraiki, Pushto, Hindko, Dari etc are the first languages of a lot of Pakistanis. In fact, I have met many people on trips to Thatta and Swat who cannot speak or understand any language besides Sindhi and Pushto, respectively. And what's more, according to ethnologue.com, in 1993, only 7% of Pakistanis were native speakers of Urdu.

It seems a little preposterous to me that this 7% can lay sole claim to being Pakistani, disenfranchising the remaining 93%. It was such linguistic chauvinism that ultimately cost us East Pakistan.

As for the ridiculous claim that Urdu is more native to Pakistan than English, let me point out that both Urdu and English were brought to the subcontinent by colonial armies, the Mughal and British, respectively, and that too around the same time, in the sixteenth century. Urdu and English have equal history in the subcontinent.

The actual reason why most people have a problem with English is that it does not fit in well with the post-independence narrative, which, somewhat artificially, binds Pakistanis to the Mughals, spiritually, culturally, linguistically and historically, and distances us from the British and their legacy in the subcontinent. This is the outcome of Pakistanis – an extremely heterogeneous group of people – desperately looking to define themselves. But it is a misguided effort. Defining ourselves through a monolithic narrative (and language) is to marginalize the local histories, cultures and realities of the people of Pakistan. We are a diverse, pluralistic people with many differences and the sooner we learn to embrace and celebrate these differences instead of demonizing and suppressing them, the faster we will evolve a more cohesive and inclusive national identity for ourselves.

Governmentium

2008-10-17T03:29:00.000-07:00

Wajahat Latif writes hilariously on 26 September 2008 in his column in The Nation:

Much as my heart aches, here is something I have received by email on a new discovery that I should, in a dark humoured way, share with you:

"New Heaviest Element Discovered"

A major research institution has recently announced the discovery of the heaviest element known to science. Its existence was proved during the hurricane, gasoline, war and other issues of the last year or two. The new element has been named Governmentium.

Governmentium (Gv) has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called mo-rons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called pe-ons.

Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A minute amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second, to take over four days to complete.

Governmentium has a normal half-life of four years. It does not decay, however, but instead undergoes a reorganisation in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, as each reorganisation will cause more mo-rons to become neutrons, forming iso-dopes.

When catalysed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium - an element which radiates just as much energy as Governmentium because, though it has only half as many pe-ons, it has twice as many mo-rons.

Lack of confidence

2008-10-14T01:39:00.000-07:00

With bombs exploding almost daily, Pakistanis are united at the very least in their concern for their safety. How does one stop the terrorists from striking? Surely additional police security and random checking of vehicles seem like appropriate measures. We can all bear the nuisance of worse traffic jams if it means that the police will prevent more bombs from going off. At least, that was my opinion till very recently.

Now, ever since the Marriott blast, security has been tightened in Karachi, but not, it seems, to protect the public. The roads in front of the Governor House and Bilawal House have been barricaded causing major inconvenience to commuters but not really protecting the public as such. It seems like we are keeping up our end of the bargain and the government is not.

Then there are the hordes of policemen stationed at every corner. They often pull commuters over for 'random' checks, but in my experience most of the people pulled over have been motorcyclists, who serve as easy targets. The policemen always wear this smarmy grin on their faces, like they cannot wait to harrass the next person and get their next hundred rupee bribe.

How can we, the public, entrust the police with extra powers to search us, when for 61 years the public and the police have had an antagonistic relationship. The police has always taken advantage of its position of power, taking bribes, arresting people at will, refusing to register FIRs and executing people in "shootouts". How are we today to trust them not to abuse the additional powers we give them to protect us from the terrorists.

It seems to me to be a Catch-22. Do not give power to the police and face the terrorists unprotected or give them power and be victimized by the police. Either way the public suffers and the poor and powerless more so than the rich. The police always avoid harrassing the powerful and the terrorists, in attacking crowded places, always disproportionately kill the poor.

The western countries have faced a similar dilemma and have mostly chosen to surrender their liberties to the state to protect them against the terrorists. Take for example America's Patriot Act, which allows intelligence agencies to access email, telephone, financial and medical records more easily. But where citizens of those countries can trust their own institutions, we cannot say the same for our institutions.

An overheard conversation

2008-10-05T01:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my baby sister was invited to the birthday party of a two-year old girl from her pre-Montessori. My other sister went with her to the party and reported back events that went something like this:

Setting: The vast if slightly wilted garden of a massive if slightly dull DHA bungalow. Two-year old boys and girls are jumping in a bouncing castle, rocking merrily in swings, running enthusiastically around the garden, scraping their knees on the driveway: in general doing what two-year olds usually do at a birthday party. Running behind this clutch of children – perhaps ten or twelve in number – are an equal number of very harassed looking Filipino nannies. They are holding the children's hands as they test the bouncing castle, bringing them food and water when they demand it and soothing the occasional temper tantrum. In one corner, the mothers, young women in their mid-twenties are sitting in comfortable garden chairs. They are wearing light, spring-coloured shalwar kameezes and huge branded sunglasses. In their bejeweled hands they are holding virgin pina coladas.

DHA homemaker 1: It is just horrible! My nanny ran off last week without a word.

DHA homemaker 2 (lowering her sunglasses): You don't say!

DHA homemaker 1: I have been running after Shahrik this entire week. I am so completely exhausted. You know this was the first time in these two years that I had to change a diaper. I just didn't know what to do. I had to call the sasu ma and you know how much she likes to gloat about these things.

DHA homemaker 3 (wrinkling her nose): Oh ho bichari! I don't know what I would do if I had to clean Zainab's poo.

DHA homemaker 1: Hai na? I was so furious. I called the agency and demanded an explanation. And you know what they told me? [dramatic pause] They told me that she has runaway with my neighbours' driver!

DHA homemaker 3 snorts. DHA homemaker 2 looks appalled.

DHA homemaker 2: Where was this woman from?

DHA homemaker 1 (struggling to remember): I'm not sure. I think she was Muslim. She wore a hijab. Indonesia, maybe.

DHA homemaker 2: Oh no! That's where you went wrong, dear. Always go for the Filipinos. They're all Christians or Buddhists or something. They wouldn't dream of running off with someone from here.

DHA homemaker 3 (nodding towards the Filipino nannies): But still. Even these ones are so problematic. Did you know by their contract with the agency, they can go home only once every two years. But mine had a little kid back home and she really wanted to visit. So Saleem – the senti man that he is – he agreed. Sent her back twice last year. And now she is always wanting to go back. I just called the agency before coming here. Told them that she was giving me too much trouble.

DHA homemaker 2 (sipping her pina colada): You just cannot give these people any freedom. The moment you do, it goes to their head. I don't let mine mingle with anyone. She doesn't leave the house without me. Why let her make friends with strangers? Next thing I know she'll come back with all sorts of demands. She stays at home. Buss. But then I have such a soft heart. I feel bad for her stuck in the house all the time, so every month or so I take her with me when I go shopping. [a contemplative pause] But they do lead a pretty good life.

All the other homemakers nod and murmur their agreement.

DHA homemaker 2: Can you imagine allowing a Pakistani masi to live in this kind of luxury? Still they show no appreciation. Always wanting more of this and more of that.

The homemakers all shake their heads in disappointment. DHA homemakers 1 and 3 fill their napkins full of hors d'oeuvres, clearly determined to smother their sorrows with food. A nanny in the background gets kicked in the shin by an exuberant little girl, who then promptly dissolves into tears. The party continues.

The irony! Oh the irony!

2008-10-05T01:46:00.000-07:00

Zia ul Haq, in the speech announcing the enforcement of his sharia laws: "Many a ruler did what they pleased in the name of Islam."

Women of the past

2008-10-02T05:19:00.000-07:00

I have been reading William Dalrymple's White Mughals. In one of the chapters, he describes the lives of Muslim women in the Mughal aristocracy in the eighteenth century. His description is largely based on the travelogue, written by an Iranian man, Mir Abdul Lateef Shushtari, called Tuhfat al-Alam. In the book, Shushtari continuously expresses his disgust at the great freedom that Muslim women in India enjoyed. They mixed with men more easily and tended to have more political and financial power than their counterparts in Iran and the Middle East. In fact, the position of women in Mughal society appears to be even more advantageous than the position of women in our society today, three centuries later. Pakistanis seem to have rejected the liberal spirit of the Mughals – with whom Pakistanis so like to identify – in favor of the puritanical social and religious codes of the Middle East. Below is an extract from White Mughals that underscores my point:

"Muslim women in India have always played a more prominent role in politics than their sisters in the Middle East. Indian society, both Hindu and Muslim, was certainly very patriarchal and hierarchical; yet there are nevertheless several cases of very powerful Indian Muslim queens: Razia Sultana in thirteenth-century Delhi; or Chand Bibi and Dilshad Agha, the two warrior queens of sixteenth-century Bijapur, the first of whom was famous for her horsewomanship, while the latter was renowned for her prowess as an artillerywoman and an archer, personally shooting in the eye from atop her citadel Safdar Khan who had the temerity to attack her kingdom.

"Moreover Mughal princesses tended to be richer, and to possess far greater powers of patronage, than the secluded Iranian noblewomen Shushtari would have been familiar with in Iran: half the most important monuments in Shah Jehan's Mughal Delhi were built by women...

"Aristocratic Mughal women also tended to be much better educated than their Iranian cousins: almost all of them were literate, and were taught at home by elderly male scholars or 'learned matrons'; the curriculum included ethics, mathematics, economics, physics, logic, history, medicine, theology, law, poetry and astronomy. As a result there were many cases of highly educated Indian Muslim princesses who became famous writers or poetesses." (168-9)

Eid Mubarak!

2008-09-30T10:11:00.000-07:00

I know, I know. It is early. One cannot wish people Eid Mubarak before the Eid namaz. But I ain't gonna be blogging that early in the morning and from the looks of it, will not be anywhere close to my laptop all day tomorrow. I am scheduled to visit millions of relatives around the city tomorrow.

Back to the point: Eid Mubarak to all the Muslims out there. Congratulations to those who kept all your rozas, you certainly deserve the festivities. Congratulations also to everyone else who can now emerge from the strange Ramazan routine and return to normal life. I for one cannot wait to start lounging in coffee shops again and listening to music on the radio instead of religious songs and such.

Enjoy your time in the shopping markets tonight, and at Eid namaz tomorrow and then later at your friends and relatives' houses. Try to be safe. I sincerely hope that the terrorists do not ruin tomorrow and turn what is meant to be a joyous day into one of tragedy.

On that hopeful note, I end with the last of the traditional three repeated greetings: Eid Mubarak!

Media circus

2008-09-30T09:56:00.000-07:00

The ruet chief finally felt ready to address the nation. I watched the event unfold on Geo with baited breath and growing impatience. The man, dressed in a white shalwar kameez and black waistcoat, with a thick jet black beard, a Jinnah cap and really ugly plastic-framed glasses, positioned himself in front of a whole herd of microphones. This was apparently the head of the national Ruet-e-Hilal committee, a mufti like all the other bearded and bespectacled men seated at the table. Behind the chief was a proper horde of anxious and slightly bored reporters. The chief clears his throat and asks several times if everyone is ready. I, in the meantime, am wringing my hands and begging him to just say yes or no and deliver the entire nation of its misery. But this man had other plans in mind.

He begins with a tilawat. I groan. He has not even finished saying bismillah when a reporter's cellphone starts to ring. Another reporter to the chief's right is busy smsing on his cellphone. The chief is visibly annoyed. Without stopping his recitation of the Quran, he waves his left hand at the reporters, trying to get them to pipe down. It does not work. Another cellphone starts ringing. A helpful reporter makes shushing noises. The recitation and the hand-waving continue. Finally, the painful tilawat ends and the chief launches into what resembled an Oscar speech. " I would like to thank this fellow and that fellow and oh that fellow too." A million different maulanas were acknowledged for their contribution to the decision making process while I literally writhed in agony before the television. Just give me a yes or a no!

After the thank yous were all finished – surprisingly enough, Allah did not receive any acknowledgment from the chief, hmmmm – the chief launched into an awful, prewritten speech. He delivered it with painstaking slowness and in a complete monotone. He clearly wanted to make his moment before the nation last. He went on and on about the immense responsibility in his hands of deciding the fate of 160 million Muslims and their rozas. My mother wisely noted that mufti sahib was only stretching this out because he knew the moment he would give their verdict we would all change the channel, or at the very least put him on mute.

Finally, in belabored Urdu, mufti sahib announced that testimonies of moon sightings had been accepted and tomorrow is Eid. Well, why didn't you say that in the first place, mufti sahib? He was promptly put on mute by my family.

Baited breath

2008-09-30T09:30:00.001-07:00

Ooh! It seems like there have been 15 sightings of the moon in Peshawar. The Chief Minister of NWFP has declared Eid in the province. Apparently, he has overstepped his constitutional limits. It is only for the ruet-e-hilal to announce Eid. Do I smell some drama?

The fogeys are said to be voting on the issue. If they vote no, are we going to have another divided Eid? That would be a shame. It would also mean that I have to go to work tomorrow. Despite it being a public holiday (irrespective of the ruet's decision), I am required to report to work if it is not Eid in Karachi. Thus, my interest in the fogeys.

Either ways, I really hope they make up their minds soon. And while I am hoping, might I also hope that we have a united Eid. At the very least the Muslims of this nation can celebrate their most important religious holiday together. After all wasn't this nation created on the basis of Muslim unity?

Ruet-e-Hilal

2008-09-30T09:11:00.000-07:00

Urgh! Why must old fogeys decide when Eid is going to fall every year? My father says that there are old fogey meetings on every level, from district to provincial to national. They all gather every month and, I assume, strain their rheumatic necks and cataract-clouded eyes in search of the thin sliver of the new moon. Small wonder that almost every year they emerge from their late night meetings and shake their heads at us. Not tomorrow, the day after.

The strain on one such fogey was clearly visible today when he spoke to the media briefly, and that too only to rail against the ungrateful public which only gives a flying **** about it once a year. He yelled angrily that for the remaining months of the year, no one cared about their verdicts. Well, of course, old man. We do live in the twenty-first century and follow the solar calendar on a day to day basis. Ever heard about that? Unlike this antiquated system, the solar calendar is laid out years in advance and does not need grandpas to figure out when one month begins and another ends.

Which brings me to my main point. Why can't we just tell the Met to figure out the lunar calendar for us? Tell it to do some math and figure out when the first day of each lunar month should be. It would give us all the opportunity to plan our lives a little better. I for one would not have to sit grumpily before the television waiting for this committee to make up its mind.

It is a doomed suggestion , I know. It would send all the puritans – which nowadays includes just about everyone in this country – up in arms. Breaking from tradition, unislamic, heresy. I can here all the politicians and pundits denouncing it on national television. Fine, I shall let these fellows on these committees have their moment of glory. Whatever.

Reflection

2008-09-20T09:42:00.000-07:00

On Dawn TV, Mr. Liaqat Baloch of the Jamaat-i Islami echoed my father. These attacks are a result of wrong policies carried out by our government in the tribal regions. This is proof of a policy failure. We must reverse our decision to fight and talk to the terrorists, whom he referred to as "our own people". When the newscaster asked whether we have not gone beyond the point of dialogue today, Mr. Baloch only repeated his mantra.

At this point, I do not think it is adequate for me to simply state Mr. Baloch and my father's views because too many people see them as completely rational, even self-evident.

These terrorists are not our people. They are up in arms against us. They want to bring down the Pakistani government and in the process are willing to kill as many Pakistani soldiers and civilians as is necessary.

I will not argue about why and how these terrorists came into being. You will tell me that they are only doing the noble thing, avenging the blood of their relations cruelly murdered by the Pakistanis and the Americans. I will tell you that the terrorists existed before the attacks on them, and not the other way around. You will say that those terrorists were an American myth. I will point you to every sort of evidence in the Western media (I would give you proof from our own too, but it is too feeble an institution to do any reporting of its own) as to the existence of these terrorists and their ill-intentions. You will tell me that the Western media is in on this conspiracy and that nobody can be trusted and everything is exactly the opposite of what it seems to be and so the logical is actually illogical and that your illogic is therefore the truth.

So let us skip the blame game. These terrorists exist. They have bombed a hotel killing 40 so far, injuring dozens more, and leaving at least 15 trapped inside with no way to escape. This much we can surely agree upon.

They do not want to negotiate. They want to kill innocent people and thereby sow fear in our hearts. So far so good?

Now what must we do in response? Are we to go to Swat and FATA and beg for negotiations? Let us say that we do, as we have done in the past. They will say they want Shariah Law in their regions, complete autonomy and withdrawal of the army. Can we agree to these terms? Can we abandon, to the whims of these terrorists, our citizens there, whose only fault is that they happen to be living in these terrorist-infested regions? Can we leave these people to suffer public beheadings and stonings-to-death under these terrorists' warped version of Islam? Can we withdraw from these regions and let them reorganize, plan bigger attacks and encroach upon more of our country? And most importantly can we reward the terrorists for murdering these innocent Pakistani citizens?

We should rather avenge these deaths. Action should be swift and decisive. The militants must be brought to their knees at any cost. They cannot be allowed to terrorize our country.

But instead, the people who are speaking on television tonight are busy bemoaning that we ever took on these terrorists in the first place. They are crying that if we would not have harmed them they would not have harmed us. Why oh why did we listen to America! The answer is simple. These terrorists, escaping from Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, would have regrouped, gained in strength and tried to take over Pakistan anyways. They were already using Pakistan as a sanctuary from which to plan more attacks on other countries. It is unimaginable that we could let these terrorists carry out attacks on innocent people from our soil while we silently stand by and watch. And if that were to be the case then the world would have been just as justified as it was with Afghanistan to sanction the use of military force against Pakistan.

So please people, stop all this talk of appeasement of the terrorists, and stop trying to blame America for the actions of the vicious terrorists. This tragic event should bolster our resolve to fight the terrorists not weaken it. Our dead need to be avenged. These terrorists need to be brought to justice.

Still Speechless

2008-09-20T08:45:00.000-07:00

My father, who was also watching the news when I returned, has just informed me that these terrorists are a direct result of the eight-year military operation in FATA which Pakistan conducted on America's behest; that the people we killed there have spawned the terrorists who today attacked the Marriott; and that we must now reap the violence that we ourselves have sown.

I am staggered. And the sad truth is that a lot of Pakistanis would agree with my father.

In essence, half the people in this country want to kill everyone and the other half believe that they deserve to be killed. What am I supposed to do in the middle of this madness?

Speechless

2008-09-20T08:06:00.000-07:00

I just posted to this blog and switched on the TV. A suicide bomber has attacked the Marriott in Islamabad. The TV is filled with images of a fire raging through the hotel. Over 20 people are confirmed dead and many more injured. The suicide bomber ran his car through the security barrier at the gate. The car was loaded with explosives.

He attacked Marriott at iftar time, when god-knows-how-many families must have been there opening their fasts.

Is absolutely nothing sacred to these bastards?

I don't want anymore half-assed rhetoric about addressing terrorism. I don't want anymore equivocation. I don't want anymore peace treaties and accords. I want the army to do what it is supposed to, protect the people of this country, and go get those bastards in FATA and Swat. Alive or dead.

I think I am going to go back to the TV and watch the death toll rise. Latest news on this can be found here, here, here and here.

Women and Public Spaces

2008-09-20T07:35:00.000-07:00

It was only when I visited Sri Lanka that I realized how far behind Pakistan is in terms of women's lib. On the streets in Sri Lanka, whether in Colombo and Kandy or in the smaller villages, there were women everywhere – and I mean everywhere, not just in and around bazaars as is the norm here. They walked in groups, alone or with other men. They did not seem worried or badgered. One could tell that these women have grown up walking on the streets without fear of being harassed, humiliated or attacked.

There were female traffic police officials and, wonder of wonders, people were not hitting on them or being rude to them.

Equally wonderful was the number of stores owned by women. Photocopy shops, restaurants, grocery stores, all run by women.

I even saw women on motorbikes, something completely unimaginable here.

Well, actually, all these things are unimaginable in Pakistan. The roads are a purely male-dominated space. Most women are kept at home, allowed only to leave to go to the bazaar or with a male escort. Richer women, who are not fettered by these conservative rules, move around in their chauffeured cars. They hop into their cars at the gate of one place and hop out at the gate of another, completely avoiding the need to walk on the roads. And those few women who have to brave the roads and the public transport must tolerate stares and worse.

My maid always wears a burqa when she is out on the road. This, she says, is purely for utilitarian reasons. If she wears a burqa, men tend to harass her less. But she clarifies that even this does not prevent some men from staring or making lewd comments.

A Spoiled Man by Daniyal Mueenuddin

2008-09-20T07:28:00.000-07:00

A very interesting story by a Pakistani-American in The New Yorker. Check it out.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes

2008-09-13T23:31:00.000-07:00

I was several months late in reading Mohammed Hanif's book. In June, A Case of Exploding Mangoes was all that anyone could talk about. After reading the book, I understand why. It is a truly a wonderful piece of satire. I have transcribed one of my favorite parts, Hanif's fictionalization of how Zia came up with the Hudood Ordinance, below. Zia is on the phone with his spiritual mentor, some religious judge in Saudi Arabia, and the following conversation takes place:

'Yes, Qadi, I wanted your guidance on this matter: what happens if the accused says that she was forced to fornicate? How do we establish whether she is telling the truth? I mean, sometimes you can look at a woman's face and tell that she is a fornicator, but we need legal procedures to establish it.'

Qadi spoke as if he had thought about this for a long time. 'Women always make this excuse after they are caught fornicating, but we all know that rape is not easy to commit. The perpetrator will need at least four accomplices. There will have to be two men holding her by her arms, two pinning down her legs and then the fifth one between her legs, committing the act. So the answer is yes, a woman can be raped and it's a serious crime.'

'So the woman will be required to recognize all five culprits in the court?' Zia asked.

'Our law, you know, is not set in stone, it encourages us to use our common sense. So the two men who are holding her down by her arms, maybe the woman would not be able to recognise those two and the judge can make an exception.'

'And what if she didn't see any of the culprits? What if they were wearing masks?'

General Zia could tell the old man was suddenly angry.

'Why would a rapist wear a mask? Is he a bank robber? Bank robbers wear masks. Kidnappers wear masks. I have never heard of a rapist wearing a mask in my forty years as a judge.'

General Zia felt stupid as Qadi continued, this time in a cold, admonishing, teacher-like voice. 'Rapists like to see their own reflection in the woman's eyes. That is one reason they'd never wear masks,' said Qadi.

'And what if the woman in question was blind?' General Zia asked.

Qadi clearly didn't get General Zia's drift.

'Do you mean morally blind or someone who Allah has not given the physical power to see?'

'Blind. A woman who can't see.'

'The law doesn't differentiate between those who can see and those who can't. Let's assume for the sake of legal argument that the rapist was blind in this case, would he be entitled to any special privilege? So the victim, blind or not, is entitled to the same scrutiny, same rights.'

'How will she recognize her rapists and the other people who held her down?'

'It can be done in two ways: if she is married, her husband will have to establish in the court that she is of good character and then we'll need four male Muslims of sound character who have witnessed the crime. And since rape is a very serious crime, circumstantial evidence won't do. "We heard screams and we saw blood and we heard the man hitting her" is not enough evidence; witnesses will be required to have witnessed the actual penetration. And if the woman is not married she'll have to prove that she was a virgin before this horrible crime was committed.'

General Zia felt much better by dinner time. He had already passed Qadi's legal advice to his Chief Justice and was now composing a speech in his head that he would ask the First Lady to deliver at the annual charity bazaar of the All Pakistan Professional Women's Association. He tried to test some of the arguments on the First Lady after reminding her of her promise to carry out her state duties. She listened silently at first, but when he reached the part about the victim having to establish her virginity the First Lady interrupted him.

'Are you talking about Blind Zainab's case?'

'Well, yes, but basically we are trying to establish a legal precedent that will safeguard women's honour. All women's honour.'

'I don't know anything about the law and I'll make this speech it that's what the law says.' The First Lady pushed her plate away. 'But how is this woman supposed to prove that she is a virgin if a bunch of men banged her for three days and three nights?' (138-9)

-- Excerpt from Hanif Mohammed, A case of exploding mangoes. Random House. New Delhi; 2008.

Taking Geo to task

2008-09-13T06:57:00.001-07:00

Most people must be aware of what happened on 7 September 2008. Dr. Aamir Liaquat Hussain, host of Geo TV's popular religious show, Aalim Online, said on his show that the murder of all Ahmadis is mandated by Islamic teachings. His remarks were followed by the murder of two Ahmadis, one in Nawabshah and one in Mirpurkhas, by unknown individuals.

This incident shocked me to the core. I can understand Baitullah Mehsud setting up an illegal radio station and preaching hatred and violence through it, but it is inconceivable to me how Geo TV, perhaps the most popular and trusted news channels in Pakistan, could air such malevolent statements.

In previous posts, I have strongly supported freedom of the press, but the line must be drawn at instigation to violence. We as a nation tend to be intolerant of religious differences but we are not Nazi Germany that the mainstream media can with impunity talk about the wholesale extermination of a religious minority.

As far as I know, Geo TV has neither cancelled this hate-preaching show, nor offered a public apology for 7 September. The very same news channel that last year, during the Emergency, was the people's hero, has today fallen to an astonishing low.

But I think that this event is the moment of truth for urban moderates and liberals. So far we have only bemoaned hate-mongering in that is prevalent in the far-flung regions of our country. It was not in our power to do anything concrete to prevent that. Now, on the other hand, a media group from our midst is preaching hate and advocating violence. We are all in a position to influence Geo TV because our tuning in to their channel is what brings them money. If we call and email Geo to express our condemnation it will have to listen and respond. Now is the time for us to act on our beliefs and do something about the extremism that is rotting our society. We, members of civil society, must act firmly and decisively against Geo TV so that other media outlets will be wary of airing such inflammatory garbage.

For more details on the incident, please visit the Asian Human Rights Commission's website. It gives you the option of sending a letter of appeal to government officials, urging them to look into the matter. I, however, would suggest that you call or email Geo directly and demand an explanation, express your condemnation and/or ask for a public apology and for the cancellation of Aalim Online.

Whatever you do, please do not sit back and let this one slide.

Racism

2008-09-08T01:26:00.000-07:00

Pakistanis are the most racist people I know. We, in Pakistan, may hear and read a lot more about the West's Islamophobia and about discrimination against minorities there, but that is just because racism in Pakistan is left completely undiscussed. The intellectuals and the media do not talk about it, and of course, it is way too much to expect the government and the religious elite to deal with it. And so, racial and ethnic prejudices in Pakistanis remain entirely unexamined and most Pakistanis blithely display their bigotry in their interactions with members of different races and ethnicities.

To convince the unmoved reader of the extent of racism in Pakistanis, I have listed some of the stereotypes that I have come across. This list is in no way comprehensive but, in my opinion, is long enough to mandate a serious conversation about the issue.

1. Pathans are considered stupid, aggressive, oversexed, homosexual, pedophiles, religious fanatics and mysoginists. They are the butt of an entire genre of Pakistani jokes, which are called akhroat (walnut) jokes, so named because Pathans are supposed to be thick-headed like walnuts.

2. Punjabis are stereotyped as crass, vulgar, fat and gluttonous.

3. Sindhis are said to be feudal, servile, docile, backward (especially with regards to women's rights), nosy and illiterate.

4. Baloch are thought to be tribal, uncivilized, violent and illiterate.

5. Muhajirs are called bedbugs and stereotyped as being wily and money-minded.

7. Bengalis are thought to be effiminate, spineless, cheats and racially inferior.

8. Indians are supposedly all Hindus, vegetarian, amoral piss-drinkers.

10. Africans are considered irrational, violent, barbaric, uncivilized, ugly, prone to crime and racially inferior. Their color and their blunt features are looked at with undisguised abhorrence by Pakistanis, who refer to Africans and African-Americans rather derogatorily as kallas (blacks).

11. Asians are stereotyped as tiny, spineless and uncivilized. They too are considered racially inferior and their narrow eyes are the basis of many Pakistani slurs including chaptas and chinkies. Many Pakistanis will unabashedly admit that all Asians look exactly alike to them.

12. Jews are stereotyped as money-hungry, Zionists, anti-Muslim and extremely wealthy. Jews are at the center of almost every international conspiracy theory in Pakistan. America is thought to be entirely run by this evil Jewish super-race. 9/11 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are all chalked up to a Jewish conspiracy. Many in Pakistan will even go so far as to say that the Holocaust was merely a story concocted by the Jews who control the media to garner international sympathy and secure support for Israel.

13. The people of the West are considered white, arrogant, hypocritical, ignorant, anti-Islam, pro-Israel, hedonistic, amoral, indecent, oversexed, decadent, Satanic, biased, racist and evil. I have lumped all of Europe and America together as the West because Pakistanis apply these stereotypes to every white person from a developed country. Of course, if said white person turns out to be American, then things are all the worse.

As I said at the beginning of this list, this is by no means a complete account of racism in Pakistan. These stereotypes not only exist in the minds of most Pakistanis, but they exist entirely unchallenged. It is a small wonder then that Pakistanis tend to be so xenophobic and communalistic.

"We should not let these corrupt politicians win."

2008-08-19T04:41:00.000-07:00

An hour ago I got this SMS from some random number:

"Its time to backup our President Musharraf! We should not let these corrupt politicians win. So send sms to Dawn news poll for rating impeachment measures. Write "DOP NO" and send on 6622 to support the man who dared to stand up against worst situations, when others were sitting in the lap of luxury!"

A case in point of the bias against politicians in the upper classes. I am not saying that politicians are not corrupt. Far from it. The evidence against Mr. Ten Percent, the late Shehzadi, the not-so-Sharif brothers and the Chaudharys of Gujrat is undeniable. What really annoys me is people's blind spot when it comes to corruption in the army.

It is common knowledge that a huge chunk of the many billion dollars in military aid given to the army during the 1980s and again in the 2000s did not go towards strengthening the army but instead went to fill up our oh-so-brave army generals' McScrooge-like vaults in the big bad firangi lands. Yet, defying all facts and logic, the army has somehow managed to remain a symbol of honesty and patriotism, and is expected to rescue Pakistan from corruption. Hah!

Corruption is pervasive in every institution of the country: bureaucracy, judiciary, law enforcement, politics, armed forces. You name a public institution and you will find corruption there. But people only rant and rave about corrupt politicians.

I am not saying that people should stop criticizing them. Go right ahead. But do please realize that the army, the institution that is to deliver our country from the greedy politicians, is just as blighted by corruption.

What makes matters worse is that the public does not have access to the records of military spending. Even our legislators, it seems, do not have access to it. So if the politicians are looting the country in plain sight of the people, one can only imagine the plunder going on in total absence of public oversight.

Then we come to Musharraf's personal reputation as Great (and Upright) Avenger aka. Scourge of Corrupt Politicians. One must wonder where he was while the opportunistic hordes in the King's Party stuffed their pockets and bought thousands of acres of land for mere pennies. And let us not forget the unscrupulous politicians who were ushered in under Musharraf's grand devolution of democracy dreams.

While Musharraf selectively prosecuted his political rivals in the beginning of his reign through the NAB, our Great (and Upright) Avenger demurely looked the other way when his own coterie abused their positions of power. Then in the latter years, when the going got tough for our principled Scourge of Corruption, he backtracked with amazing speed and acquitted those very corrupt politicians whom he was prosecuting earlier through the NRO.

Let us also not forget the ex-President's non-negotiable and undebatable budget for the President House this year. Rs. 353.84 million! A 12% increase over the previous year. And that too when the Prime Minister prudently cut his own expenses by 30% in view of massive governmental overspending.

So people who, handkerchief in hand, are wondering how their knight in shining army fatigues abandoned them in the clutches of corrupt politicians, have heart. We have been in the hands of corrupt leaders, autocratic and democratic, for 61 glorious years. Things really can't get much worse as far as looting goes.

David Milliband, UK's foreign secretary, said something I really liked on the occasion of Musharraf's resignation. He said that strong institutions, not strong individuals, are what Pakistan needs. He is right. For the long-term solution of most of Pakistan's governance problems strong institutions are exactly what are required, and the chances of institutional development are definitely brighter under a democratic government, which is compelled to listen to the public, rather than an autocratic one. So have a little faith, people, and stop sending me hysterical SMSes!

Of Pakistan's New Media and Old Firebrands

2008-08-06T01:18:00.000-07:00

It is a brand new world here in Pakistan. Under the new democratic government, the media seems freer than it ever was before. The play Chicago was up at the Pakistan Arts Council for eleven nights and was sold-out all eleven times. I went to watch it on Saturday and came out thrilled that such a risqué piece of theater was actually allowed here. Bold dances, sexy clothes, and unabashed references to sex! The audience, laughing and clapping through the entire play, absolutely loved it. And I, with more than a little wonder, thought that this would never have been possible five years back.

I also went to see the latest Pakistani movie Ramchand Pakistani over the weekend and was once again pleasantly surprised at how unconstipated its attitude towards sex and sexuality was.

The same is the case with the new TV channels and radio stations that have been flourishing over the past couple of years. Najam Shiraz’s new song Khwabon Ke Rishtey is a case in point. His music video deals with the problems teenage girls face from unwanted pregnancies and cheating boyfriends to sexual harassment and parental neglect. I won’t go so far as to say that his video deals with these things in a meaningful way but just that these taboo topics can be touched upon is something remarkable to me.

But really, underneath the face of an apparently free press, there is actually rampant self-censorship. While governmental interference is no longer something of huge concern to the media, the specter of an irrational mullah mob chanting Allah-u-Akbar and waving pitchforks and torches does send shivers down its spine.

I tell you this with such authority because I have been working at Dawn TV for the past month and have witnessed the self-censorship firsthand. There is an old man at Dawn TV, who looks like a relic from PTV of the fifties, called Censor Uncle. He watches all the shows before they air and checks to see whether the content will ruffle any fundo feathers or not. One talk show was forbidden from discussing abortion and another from mentioning that alcohol was legal before Bhutto went fundo in the 70s.

It is deplorable that the media feels compelled to censor itself when talking about simple historical facts or important social issues. So perhaps these new franker conversations about gender, sex and sexuality have to be put in the context of crazy Taliban burning down girls schools in Swat and vigilante groups of burqa clad women kidnapping Chinese masseuses. The mullah mob is able to bully the new freer media into self-censorhsip because of the government’s ambivalent attitude towards religion-motivated vigilantism. The media would naturally protect itself rather than offend the crazies and find itself facing their wrath without any government protection.

Some may ask why it is so important to protect the media’s right to talk about sex anyways, especially since it makes most older Pakistanis extremely uncomfortable. Well first off, on the matter of principle, because freedom of speech means letting people talk about things that you do not like or agree with. Secondly because this traditional taboo on sex and sexuality prevents us as a society from having an honest debate and spreading awareness about women’s rights, sexual abuse, STDs, AIDS, unwanted pregnancies, abortions, family planning, rape, LGBT rights, sexual harassment and so many other issues. The new media can help us overcome our national prudishness but the government has to help it too by protecting it from the vigilante violence of the mullah brigade.

The Democracy Debate

2008-07-30T11:16:00.000-07:00

I was watching Dawn TV the other day, and Mr. Ali Azmat was being interviewed on Talk Back. After waxing eloquent about the poor and the oppressed, Mr. Azmat suddenly launched into an aggressive anti-democracy tirade. For ten minutes he said something to the effect of Musharraf is the man. Then pompously, he said that Pakistan doesn’t deserve democracy and democracy only means that the illiterate idiots (I am roughly translating jahil, the word he used with much contempt) of this country will vote for other illiterate idiots and promote “feudal” politics.

It is not like I have not heard this argument before. Every opponent of democracy in Pakistan will dutifully cite this argument, and I would not really bother to rebut it if not for the fact that it leaves many proponents of democracy completely stumped.

So let’s settle this once and for all. The fact that Pakistan’s literacy rate is an abysmal 50% does not mean that it is unsuitable for democracy. This argument assumes that people who cannot read are automatically incapable of both rational thought and of deciding what is best for them, which is about all that people need to make a democracy work.

During elections, politicians outline what they will do if elected. Individuals vote for those who they think will best represent their interests. The person/party that represents the most people’s interests wins the elections. If by the next elections it does not deliver on its promises or if the people now want something those in government are not offering they are not reelected. Democracy in a nutshell.

Now, it does not take a person decades of schooling to decide (a) what he or she wants from the government and (b) whether once elected the government has followed through on its promises. Then why does this argument have currency with so many people in the “literate” upper and middle classes (UMC)?

The answer is simple. Just as the British colonizers had the myth of the incompetent natives to justify colonization, the UMC of Pakistan have the myth of the illiterate idiot poor person to justify a form of governance that suits them.

Military dictators in Pakistan have historically been economically beneficial to the UMC. In both Ayub and Musharraf’s eras, the economic growth benefited only those who were already well to do. Economic disparity grew dramatically making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Zia came in and put an immediate stop to Bhutto’s spree of nationalization and his socialist economic program, which was really hurting the UMC and benefiting the “illiterate” masses.

Simply put, the UMC and the masses have divergent interests. The masses want living wages, labor unions, better government education and health. The UMC want a liberal import policy, tax cuts on businesses and lots of protectionism for local industries. Democracy means that the masses get their way and the UMC lose out.

Therefore the conveniently created myth of the illiterate idiot masses. The interests of these unfortunate people can only be protected by the kinder and more liberal of the UMC, like Mr. Azmat. They cannot, of course, be allowed to govern themselves because they are not yet sophisticated enough. They must educate themselves to earn that privilege. So on and so forth.

Remind you of colonial rhetoric much?

Faiza Silmi

2008-07-21T05:05:00.000-07:00

If you have read the New York Times recently, you will probably be familiar with Faiza Silmi. She is a 32 year old Moroccan woman who applied for French citizenship. She was denied because she wore a veil (not to be confused with the headscarf). When she appealed the decision, the French court upheld it and ruled that Faiza's radical practice of Islam was not compatible with French values such as secularism and equality of the sexes.

I personally find the institution of the veil extremely abhorrent. It is based on the misogynistic logic that women bear the guilt for exciting men's sexual desires and therefore must efface their bodies so that men can remain pious. It absolves men from the responsibility of controlling their gaze and desires and makes situations possible where a man can harass a woman and later with complete moral satisfaction say that she was asking for it because she did not wear the veil.

But Faiza's case makes me extremely uncomfortable. Denying Faiza citizenship on the basis of her religious beliefs is setting a dangerous precedent for religious discrimination. Her beliefs and practices may be repulsive to the French but they should not be grounds for rejection, especially in a secular country, where the state is supposed to be blind to the individual's religious beliefs.

Her case immediately made me think of Pakistan and how disastrous such a logic would be if applied here. Since I do not believe that men are more equal than women as ordained by the Quran (2:228, 282), I would become ineligible for Pakistani citizenship. Similarly, if someone disagreed with any Muslim belief or value, he or she could be denied Pakistani citizenship, too.

To me this narrow-minded way of defining a country and its citizens' identities is extremely unsettling. In today's multicultural world where citizens of the same country are becoming more and more ethnically, linguistically, religiously and morally diverse, France's retrogressive ruling can only engender more intolerance.

Freedom of Speech

2008-07-21T04:47:00.000-07:00

“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.” On Liberty, John Stuart Mill.

We in Pakistan don’t like to be contradicted. Fathers scold their children for correcting them; rulers forbid the press from criticizing them; teachers punish students who question them; religious leaders threaten those who challenge them; and the religious majority lynches or hangs those who contradict their beliefs.

All because of the deep-seated intellectual stupidity prevalent in our society.

Free speech does not harm anyone (except when used to instigate people to violence). It does, however, inconvenience those who do not like to think, who have passively received ideas and beliefs from their family or their society. Their intellectual laziness runs so deep that they would rather riot, burn things and murder than pause to think and respond to words with words.

Ideas should be challenged; people should be inconvenienced. The state should not protect ideas and beliefs from criticism but it should protect the critics from any physical danger that their critique puts them in.

Progress is only possible through the dissemination of new ideas and we as a society must learn to tolerate them, even if they challenge everything our society stands for. We do not need to accept the ideas, we do not even need to like them, but we cannot quash the ideas just because we disagree with them. It is not for the state or society to censor or privilege ideas and beliefs. Every individual must be allowed to decide the matter for his or herself.

Besides, if we believe that what we hold to be true is in fact absolutely true, we should not shrink from letting people challenge it. The truth by its very nature must stand up to all criticism. But if we do doubt ourselves, is it not better to listen to those who claim to have some answers? The only thing we could lose is our doubt.

Endnote: I strongly recommend J.S. Mill’s On Liberty to anyone who has not read it. At the very least read the first and second chapters. His arguments for free speech are excellent. Here is a link to the book if you are interested: http://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/one.html.

The Hypocrisy of the Pakistani Muslim

2008-07-12T07:05:00.000-07:00

Pakistani Muslims are always telling people that their Islam is nothing like the Islam of the Taliban. You will find them ever ready to paint a rosy, peace-loving picture of their Islam. "Do you know that the Muslim greeting assalaamualaikum means peace be upon you?"

Well, that's very comforting to hear!

They will nod their heads vigorously and prepare to launch into an angry tirade against the Western media's conspiracy to fool the world into thinking that all Muslims are terrorists. But when you cut them off and suggest that all this must mean that they wholeheartedly condemn Islamist terrorism, most of them will flinch.

In rapid succession, they will bring up imperialism, Israel, American arrogance, state-sponsored terrorism, poverty, illiteracy and unemployment. Oh they will paint a heart-rending picture of the Islamist terrorist as a misguided child driven to violence by a cruel and unjust world. Some may partially condemn Islamist terrorism after many qualifications and after placing a good portion of the blame on the West itself. But only the brave few, the very few morally-brave few, will condemn it entirely, without explanations and clarifications and apologies.

It seems to me that Pakistani Muslims, who spend so much time nowadays denouncing "Islamophobia", are more often than not implicit supporters of the Taliban.

Think about it. If they really believed that the Taliban are following a twisted and perverted version of Islam then there would have been extremely loud demands (by which I mean rioting) forcing the Pakistani government to constitutionally declare the Taliban as non-Muslims, much like with the Ahmadiyyas in 1953 and 1974. There would have been great jubilation at the Pakistani Army fighting the Taliban in FATA and NWFP. It would have been welcomed as the triumphant swoop of the Pakistani-Muslim Army rescuing Islam from the blight of terrorism.

But wait. That is not what is happening... The Pakistani Muslims are screaming at the government to withdraw the army from FATA and NWFP and even after the Islamist terrorists have killed thousands of Pakistani soldiers and civilians the Pakistani Muslims claim that the government is acting against the terrorists only to protect America.

You are left just scratching your head in bewilderment.

So then, dear Pakistani Muslim, you don't want the terrorists in your country to be reigned in and their bases destroyed?

Uncomfortable silence.

So you're a Taliban sympathizer and even the most virulently anti-Muslim Western media outlet has been far too kind in their portrayal of you?

At this point your conversation will be terminated by a punch to the face by a very indignant and equally flustered Pakistani Muslim.

Assalaamualaikum!

Agnostic Muslim

2008-06-26T23:52:00.000-07:00

Is that a little hard to swallow? An Agnostic Muslim. Sounds like a textbook example of an oxymoron, doesn't it? But it's the best way to classify myself.

Living in Karachi all my life, submerged in its uber-Muslim society, I was always aware of my agnosticism. But it was only when I went abroad for college that I became aware of the Muslim part of the phrase. I found myself defending Muslims again and again and discovered that I care deeply about the Muslim community.

Of course I disagree with mainstream Muslims on almost everything from religion to politics to social and cultural norms. But I am an Agnostic Muslim rather than just an agnostic because, while I have no allegiance to the tenets of Islam I do have a very strong allegiance to the Muslim community.

I know a lot of people who identify as various kinds of Muslims, as atheists, agnostics or just don't give a damn one way or the other. But what I want to know is whether there are more people out there who identify as Agnostic Muslims. Leave a comment if you do. Maybe we can start a Facebook group or a book club or something :)