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Johnny Taliban is in the news again, this time not on account of anything he had done, but because of a song which is part of an upcoming album by country music singer Steve Earle. The song is called ‘John Walker’s blues’

John Walker Lindh who had come to be called the American Taliban has a new name: Johnny Taliban. Mullah Omar would not have found that funny and may even have considered him a fit candidate for apostasy and utterly, completely, absolutely outside the pale of Islam.

The young Californian who ran off to Yemen, and from there to Pakistan and, ultimately, Afghanistan to fight what he believed was the good fight was lucky in the sense that he did not get killed. He only got captured. He was big news when he was found among the surrendering Taliban volunteers, the holy warriors themselves having for the most part slithered off to the safety of their caves or perhaps, across the Durand Line into our wild areas. You could not switch on the television in those days without being hit by a closeup of the hairy, unwashed and half-starved Lindh. There were those who wanted him shot, that being the standard punishment for a traitor during wartime. But Lindh wasn’t shot; he was brought home to be tried.

The trial took place in Virginia which can be an unforgiving redneck state when it comes to such things as treachery. It regularly executes people and mercy petitions are more likely to be rejected here than in most other states of the Union. Lindh was lucky. He plea-bargained and received two sentences of ten years each. He pleaded guilty to two felony counts, namely helping the Taliban and carrying explosives. All other charges were dropped which means he won’t go to the gas chamber. He is unlikely to serve his full sentence though, chances of his being let out a few years earlier not being that dim. He is young, only 21, so there is world enough and time for him.

It has been said that Lindh was allowed to plea bargain because of who he was: white and upper middle class. Had he been an African-American or, say, a naturalised Arab or Pakistani, he would have been put through the wringer and given the maximum dose. After all, there are still hundreds of “Middle Eastern” types in various jails and detention facilities, all under suspicion of being Al Qaeda or members or sympathisers of its less lethal counterparts.

A week ago, Johnny Taliban was in the news again, this time not on account of anything he had done, but because of a song which is part of an upcoming album by country music singer Steve Earle. The song is called ‘John Walker’s blues’ and it has triggered emotional denunciations of the artist in many parts of the country, especially the home of country music, Nashville, Tennessee. Earle has been compared to ‘Hanoi Jane’, which was how Jane Fonda was known during Vietnam because of her opposition to the war and the fact that she visited Hanoi and made a broadcast from there. Earle has also been compared to the subject of his song, Lindh himself.

The album called ‘Jerusalem’ is due out in September. The song opens with Earle reciting ‘Ash-hadul la ilaah il-lillah’ and ends with a reading from the Quran. As for the lyrics, this is how they go: I’m just an American boy/raised on MTV/And I’ve seen all those kids in the soda pop ads/ But none of’em looked like me/So I started lookin’ around for a light out of the dim/And the first thing I heard/that made sense was the word of Mohammad/peace be upon him/We came to fight the Jihad/and our hearts were pure and strong/As death filled the air we all offered up prayers and prepared for martyrdom/Now they’re draggin’ me back with my head in a sack to the land of the infidel.

Earle has been active in the movement to abolish the death penalty and ban landmines. He is not bothered by the criticism. “In a big way this is the most pro-American record I’ve ever made. I feel urgently American.” Well, as they say, only in America.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

            Years ago, I went to look up the Mangupir crocs in Karachi. They had that lazy look, as if butter would not melt in their mouths, that crocs and politicians have. They appeared to be in no hurry to go anywhere, and, in fact, were going nowhere. Although I would rather be wearing a croc – or former croc – in my feet, I did hang around for a while to see the reptiles’ devotees feeding them. The crocs appeared to be pretty choosy about their food, which is more than can be said for human beings who would eat just anything. Much of what was thrown to the crocs, they simply ignored.

            It was only recently that I learnt why the Mangupir crocs were so snooty about their food. And the man I have to thank for unravelling that mystery is Abbas Athar, who, writing on a good day, and when in his element, is pure delight, nothing less. If I lose some of the sparkle of his Urdu in translation, I hope he won’t have me thrown to the crocs of Mangupir or his village pond in Burki which also happens to be the stomping ground of another old croc, though of the political breed, Malik Meraj Khalid.

            So over to Abbas Athar. “Two or three years ago, it was reported that Pakistan was home to a special breed of crocodile that accepted no food that which was not honestly earned. At the time, there were 90 crocs inhabiting the 600-foot Mangupir Lake. On a given day of the week, devotees used to gather there with offerings of meat, which ranged from lamb to camel to chicken. The devotee whose offering was accepted by one of the crocs, went home satisfied that his prayer had been answered. Those crocs were gifted with the ability to tell meat bought with illicit money from meat acquired through honest earnings. People would come in hundreds, carrying  their tastefully decorated offerings, beating drums and dancing. They would stand on the lakeshore and present their offerings. The principal croc and the obvious leader was  eleven feet long and known as Mor Sahib. He was believed to be 55 years old. Anyone whose offering Mor Sahib accepted considered himself singularly fortunate. The priest of the croc shrine was a 45-year old man named Sajjad.

            “Perhaps those crocs and that lake still exist, which would be an interesting coincidence in terms of our national croc culture. However, a croc, whether he is land-based or in water, is something to be feared. Not always is he entirely committed to eating food procured through honestly earned money. So bottomless is his belly and so cavernous his mouth that he can gobble up an entire animal without showing the least sign of satiation. He can consume, for instance, electric power worth hundreds of thousands of rupees without suffering even a mild stomach cramp. He can snap up billions of rupees in commissions from underhand local and foreign deals. He can swallow without trace large sums borrowed from national banks. He is known to spit up millions of dollars taken from the country’s treasury in the safe deposit vaults of Swiss and American banks.

            “He can suck the blood of landless tillers and then proceed to shed his famous crocodile tears so that it becomes impossible to differentiate the oppressor from the oppressed. It is said that the devotees of the Mangupir crocs belong to the Sheedi tribe which has an African origin. These men were brought to this part of the world by Arab slave traders in the seventh century. They never went back. However, land-based croc devotees and people like us were born right here. According to one estimate, during the days of Ayub Khan, there were only 22 crocs in Pakistan. It is another matter that millions of fish were always protesting at their presence in the land. The crocs took a hint and began to propagate their numbers. They also encouraged bigger fish to swallow smaller fish, assuring them that if they continued, one day they too could turn into crocs.

“As a result of these efforts, before long the country was infested with Qabza Groups which specialised in depriving widows and orphans of all they owned. New institutions came into being that decamped with millions in the name of the Quran. In the arid land of Gujarat, a new breed of croc took birth, specialising in gobbling up money borrowed from cooperative banks. There also appeared on the scene religious and political crocs who declared that money taken in bribes was halal. There also arose in the land, an entire generation of leaders who obtained votes on false promises, though the poor fish did not know it. Bureaucrats who used to earn just a few thousand rupees as salary realised that so fertile was this land that they could become owners of palatial villas, command vast bank balances and dispatch their children to foreign lands for higher education so that they could eventually become business tycoons abroad.

“All these crocs detest one another and though they fight, they never do anything that could jeopardise their race. They come and they go, raking in all they can lay their hands on. In between, they accuse one another of graft and dishonesty. On occasions, they also jail their opponents, but are careful not to do anything to encourage the fish to revolt against them. Their differences apart, all crocs are agreed that the status quo must be maintained because it guarantees their permanence. If the 90 Mangupir crocs who only accepted honestly earned food are still around, they pose a clear and present danger to the system. Because of them, the entire social structure can come undone. The government should immediately order an inquiry to be sure that these crocs are not foreign agents. No one will disagree that the Mangupir crocs are involved in activities that run counter to the national interest. Because of them, Pakistan’s march forward can be under threat because honest money can neither feed you nor clothe you.”

Game, set and match to Abbas Athar.

            The journalist Beena Sarwar (now lost in NGOland) once told me that Iqbal Geoffrey (the world’s greatest living artist by his own reckoning and that of Sir Herbert Read, as reported) not amused by something she had either written or cleared for publication, stormed into her office one day and demanded, “Do you want to be a writer, or do you want to be a ‘keera makora’?). Such colourful language is exclusive to Sir Geoffrey.

            When I was living in Vienna, I wrote something about Sir Geoffrey in a Lahore newspaper that obviously did not meet with the great man’s approval. Next I knew there was a string of quasi-legal notices of criminal libel, defamation and character assassination being fired off by him in all directions, with copies to every OPEC oil minister since I worked for a news agency sponsored by the oil producers’ alliance. The OPEC secretary general, Dr Subroto of Indonesia, asked me who Sir Geoffrey was and what I had done to him for Dr Subroto to have received some kind of a notice as well. It was hard to explain to him why I was going to be sued for damages running into astronomical figures in Vienna, London, New York, Paris, Sydney and Lahore. (If I have missed a city, I hope Sir Geoffrey will add it on).

            I spent the next two days looking up various Who’s Who(s) in several of which Sir Geoffrey was listed. Long indeed were the entries and very impressive they all did sound (few people know that it is the person listed who supplies the data). I decided to check Sir Geoffrey out, just in case I was to be hauled up before courts stretching from New York to Lahore for having written something funny in a newspaper that had displeased “the living legend.” It took about six weeks for most of the replies to come in and all entries except three checked. Iqbal Geoffrey was for real. We have been friends since, although the plot of land he said he was gifting to me in Lahore has not materialised. I do hope it exists, if not in Lahore, then perhaps off the coast of Sumatra.

I have also had the distinction of appearing as a defence witness in a case Sir Geoffrey once filed against a fellow lawyer (Sir Geoff holds an LL.M degree – hold your breath – from Harvard) who was appearing in his own defence. I had travelled from Islamabad to the court in Lahore. The defence lawyer asked me if I had a good memory, to which I said yes. He asked me two times more if that indeed was so. After my three enthusiastic yeses, he calmly opened a file and placed before me the same piece that had caused Sir Geoffrey to want to sue me in half the world capitals. “Did you write this?” I said I may have but it was written “light-heartedly” and it certainly did not mean that Sir Geoff was not the Greatest. I am afraid I did not make too credible a witness. Sorry Sir Geoff (I don’t know if you won or lost the case).

Several years ago, Sir Geoffrey, painter, barrister, land scam buster, litigant extraordinary and Lost Cause petitioner No. 1, filed a suit in the Lahore High Court asking their lordships to direct the government to appoint him high commissioner to London. This was on the eve of the departure to London of the Lahore businessman picked up for the post by Nawaz Sharif. Geoffrey said the man whom he called “Semi” was a diplomatic disaster in the making. Semi went anyway, had a great time of it and only fell with the government that had sent him. When BB was about to send Wajid Shamsul Hassan to London, Geoffrey filed another writ which said that another “outstanding failure” was being sent to the Court of St. James. He wondered why “incompetent scoundrels and money launderettes” were invariably picked out for such assignments, adding, “My blood boils over oppression and I abhor lack of reason, knowledge, wisdom and logic.” Wajid went as well and served (Surrey mahal included) till the last day in power of the Miss B government. He has lived in London happily ever since.

In 1999 after the fall of Nawaz Sharif, Sir Geoffrey filed another writ in which he prayed to the court to award him compensatory costs which he listed as follows: Bill of his law firm Geoffrey and Khitran, Rs 56 million, less loss of earnings as ambassador from 1992 to 1999, Rs. 32 million; plus one rupee as “cost of pain, angst and suffering humiliation”; plus one rupee for “loss of reputation and special damage to the nation (token)”; plus Rs 5 billion by way of “punitive damages” and, finally, the sub-total to be multiplied by 7.86 by way of legal costs. Sir Geoff added at the end, “I am not a child of any lesser God.” He also reminded their lordships that in 1959, he had the only decent car in Mozang (the site of latter-day tycoon Saifur Rehman’s tiny store called Zubair Medico) and, further, that in 1965, he, Iqbal Geoffrey, went around Lahore driving a “luxury limo.”

But what happened. The new boys in Islamabad sent “anthropantherologist” and “living authority on Islam” Dr Akbar S. Ahmed instead, only to get rid on him a few months later.  Sir Geoffrey was not amused. “They are all the same,” he observed, sounding a little weary, if not entirely disillusioned.

I don’t know if Sir Geoffrey is still interested, but in case London continues to beckon him, here is the latest rope trick of our current man at St. James, one Mr Jaffer. On the eve of the Brazil-England football World Cup match, he declared at the annual dinner of Pakistan Society (more than half the guests were pucca British types), “My team is going to win tomorrow.” There was much ovation at the gracious remark and the good wishes expressed by the high commissioner for the English team. The applause had hardly died down when His Excellency added, “By my team I mean Brazil.” A hush fell over the banquet hall and in the next five minutes every gora had left. It turned out that Mister Jaffer had once been honorary consul for Brazil in Karachi.

Sir Geoff, it is time for another writ.

The embarrassment of the week has been Bush’s answer to a journalist who asked why he had not gone to the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “I have two black people in my cabinet, so what need have I of going to that convention?”

If President Bush, who lectured the Wall Street on business ethics the other day, had looked up from his prepared script, even he would not have failed to notice the bemused look on more than one face among his well-heeled audience. Nor was it too auspicious a sign that by the time he had finished the speech that he had delivered both listlessly and without much conviction, the market had fallen by several notches. So much for reassurance then from the First Citizen of the United States.

This Texas thing that is refusing to go away, much as Banquo’s ghost, is looking less and less pretty. Before he became governor of the Lone Star state, he took two low-interest loans from Harken Energy Corporation, an oil company on whose executive board he served (a practice he condemned in his speech with a straight face). He took two loans, totaling $180,375, in 1986 and 1988 and used the money to buy Harken shares. He had earlier sold his failed oil and gas exploration business to Harkin.

In June 1990, Bush sold 212,140 Harkin shares for $848,560, In August, the company declared that it had lost $23.2 million in the quarter ending June 30. The announcement led to a 20 percent fall in Harkin share value. Bush was a member of the company’s audit committee and it is hard to believe that when he sold his shares he did not know that the company had suffered a loss in that quarter.

The Securities and Exchange Commission investigated the matter for possible insider trading but took no action. Bush was also late in making disclosures of stock transactions within the stipulated timeframe to the Commission, once by as much as 34 weeks. He has attributed this to a misunderstanding on the part of his lawyers. He has also called it a not so uncommon business occurrence. No matter what it is called, it takes away a good deal of gloss from the clean image the US president likes to sport.

And as if that was not enough, Vice President Dick Cheney is also receiving attention from the Securities and Exchange Commission by looking into what could be a questionable accounting practice when he was chief executive of the large Delaware-based energy services company called Halliburton. Cheney’s own $37 million stock and option windfall were directly related to profits made with the help of foreign aid packages and military contracts, according to the magazine ‘Multinational Monitor’. The company was involved in deals with some of the ugliest regimes in the world, including Burma or Myanmar where it participated in a number of energy development projects. One such project was the Yadana and Yetagun pipeline that, according to the US Department of Labour, offered “credible evidence” that several villages along the route were forcibly relocated or depopulated.

Cheney was asked by Larry King shortly before the election if Halliburton had done work in Myanmar. “You have to operate in some very difficult places and oftentimes in countries that are governed in a manner that’s not consistent with our principles here in the United States. But the world is not made up only of democracies,” he told King. How right. That may also explain why the Bush people keep looking the other way as Gen. Pervez Musharraf sets about emasculating what is left of the 1973 Constitution of Pakistan.

Be that as it may, the embarrassment of the week has been Bush’s answer to a journalist who asked why he had not gone to the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, the oldest and most respected organisation of African-American people. Bush was irritated by the question and said he had in his cabinet Colin Powell and Condi Rice. So this is how his mind works. “I have two black people in my cabinet, so what need have I of going to that convention? Isn’t enough enough?”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

            The wild cat is out of the bag and a frightening sight it is. The reporter who untied the strings to let the beast out is to be complimented for having helped remove what illusions there might have remained about the military regime’s liberal credentials and democratic claims. No military government has played midwife to democracy and this one, despite what some people may have thought initially, is proving to be no different. After all, it has come out of the same assembly line that gave us Ayub, Zia and Yahya.

            Rauf Klasra, the reporter who broke the story of the defamation law targeting journalists and newspaper publishers, would be well-advised to watch his back, since what he has put in cold print could have caused little amusement in higher quarters, not to mention what the press calls “sensitive agencies.” Dr Khalid Ranjha, the federal law minister, who had been generally well thought of before he joined the closet cabinet, sheepishly conceded that while the news report of a new defamation law on the anvil was correct, it was “incomplete.” He did not say in what respect the report was incomplete and whether the missing parts would make the law less abhorrent than it at first glance was. He also thoughtfully declared that the press would be consulted “eventually.” One can only wonder in what time-frame the law minister of a government which is to go home in October is working. Obviously, he and those he works for “at the same salary” have longer-term plans.

            As the ‘Nation’ newspaper pointed out in a leading article, there was neither a demand for a new defamation law nor need for it. The Pakistan Law Commission had made no mention of any such law that it felt the country required nor had the courts expressed their dissatisfaction with the existing law on the subject. The stealthy manner in which the ordnance has been drafted indicates more clearly than what Dr Ranjha has or has not said, the true intentions of this government. And what are those intentions? Elementary, Dr Watson. To browbeat and intimidate the working press. As simple as that.

            Ironically, the much-trumpeted Freedom of Information Act, along with such matters and the Press Council, are lying somewhere in the basement of the National Reconstruction Bureau, a body that has done about as much good to this country as a swarm of locust does to a standing field of corn. Under the proposed law, penalties will range from Rs. 1 million, which Dr Ranjha’s draftsmen describe as “special damage”, or an apology or both. Journalists will have no right to produce in their defence any document, summary or other paper to substantiate the story to which exception has been taken. The journalist being proceeded against will instead have to “satisfy” the prosecution by tendering an apology, paying a fine or doing both. In other words, it will become impossible for any independent investigation to be undertaken or published by a newspaper.

            Javed Jabbar, during his brief stay at the information ministry, set into motion a consultative process with working journalists and press-related bodies to frame new press laws which would allow freer access to information. We have come to know since what the fate of this enlightened move and the man who initiated it has been. Old JJ could never keep his head down, but he can be assured that he is better off being out of this crowd than in. Orwell wrote in 1984 that if you wanted to imagine the future, you should imagine a boot in your face, to which can be add that if the present trend continues, our future may be Chief Executive’s spokesman Rashid Qureshi’s voice ringing out at all hours of day and night from every outlet that emits image or sound.

            The draconian part of the contemplated law is its inclusion under “absolute privilege” “any report, note or matter written or published by or under the authority of a government.” If implemented, this clause will effectively apply a stopper to all investigative journalism of which there is so little in Pakistan anyway. None of the previous black laws relating to the press, including the notorious Press and Publications Ordnance, went so far as this. Is that what the new state of Pakistan is going to be. Or is it liberalism, Chaklala style?

            What is our country coming to? Gen. Musharraf’s having declared himself the lord of all he surveys for the next five years, starting October 2002, makes one think of another man who started out with so much promise and in whom many saw hope of regeneration and renewal. The man was Robert Mugabe. Where has he taken Zimbabwe, a country that had so much going for it when white minority rule finally ended? I seek permission to quote from the June 3 issue of ‘New Yorker’. “Robert Mugabe is 78 years old and has repeatedly vowed to stay in power for the rest of his life. In this spirit of restlessness, he has made it a crime, punishable by six months in jail, for two or more people in Zimbabwe to meet and discuss politics without obtaining a permit form the police at least four days in advance. The permit is just a nicety. The public order and security act (POSA) which elaborates the offence, allows the police to bar whomever they like from attending even an authorised political discussion, or to break it up any time without explanation … To be sure, the law does not prohibit a person from conducting a solitary monologue about politics, but anyone doing so must be careful what he says, since POSA also makes it a crime … to make a false statement, ‘engendering hostility towards’ or ‘causing hatred, contempt or ridicule’ of the President, or indeed to make any statement ‘about or concerning’ him that is ‘abusive, indecent, obscene or false’.”

            “Mugabe has betrayed the promises of liberation and self-determination, and, faced with the evidence of his failure, he has come to behave toward this country like a vicious child with a toy he has broken, smashing away at it as if to prove that if he cannot make it work, he can make sure that it never forgets to whom it belongs.”

            That says it all.

The print media and the television channels have reported the tragedy but not in a manner and on a scale that the story deserved. Whereas the killing or wounding of even one American serviceman is accorded extensive coverage, for others, a different scale is obviously to be used

No one has lost much sleep here in Washington over the mowing down of over forty Afghans, mostly women and children, and the injuring of a hundred or more by US aircraft hunting Al Qaeda remnants in a village in Uruzgan province.

There has been no apology, only “condolences” have been offered. The Pentagon continues to treat it as an incident under investigation, while insisting that the bombing was in retaliation against anti-aircraft fire from the compound where a wedding was being celebrated. Twenty-five members of the bridegroom’s family died. This has been the deadliest single episode involving civilian casualties in an American attack since the US-led search-and-destroy missions got underway.

The print media and the television channels have reported the tragedy but not in a manner and on a scale that the story deserved. Whereas the killing or wounding of even one American serviceman is accorded extensive coverage, for others, a different scale is obviously to be used. What the world learns about the operations in Afghanistan is what the Pentagon or the US command wishes it to know. Although there still are a large number of foreign correspondents and television teams in Afghanistan, they do not move freely but are, for the most part, escorted. Not everything that they wish to see, are they allowed to see. If a reporter falls out of line, it is obvious that he or she will find access to information either denied or circumscribed. The control on the outflow of information exercised by the US-led command is almost absolute.

There are far too many contradictions between what the coalition forces have said about the Uruzgan massacre and what the survivors or those with first-hand knowledge of what happened have said. Afghan civilians have stated that US warplanes strafed and bombed four villages for three hours. Afghan officials, who had so far refrained from making public criticism of earlier incidents involving civilian deaths, did not mince their words this time. Karzai was the first to speak, followed by foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah who said on July 2, “This situation has to come to an end. Our people should be assured every measure has been taken to avoid such incidents.”

At Pentagon, officials were tight-lipped when asked for details about what had happened. While admitting that AC-130 gunships opened fire on six locations, they stopped short of saying that these strikes were responsible for the casualties. The Pentagon spokesman Victoria Clark said evidence of damage had been found but investigators had not been able to determine the cause, nor did they see any bodies or graves. The Afghans have said that the dead were buried immediately, as is their custom.

Survivors have denied that there were any attacks on US forces in the vicinity. There was only a late-night wedding celebration. As is customary in not only Afghanistan’s Puhstun areas but in much of Pakistan’s Frontier province as well, guns are fired in the air to celebrate joyous events. The celebrants had stopped firing their guns at least five hours before the US planes moved in to bomb the area. They also deny that there were any Al Qaeda or Taliban in the region. One woman told Pamela Constable of ‘Washington Post’, “If there were Taliban or Arabs in the area, they would never have let us make such a wedding party. They did not allow people to make music or dance or beat drums. They said it was not Islamic.”
When people began to run helter-skelter to save themselves from overhead US warplanes, they were chased and strafed. “Americans can see even small things. Why couldn’t they see it wasn’t Al Qaeda? It was just women and children running,” an Afghan asked a US correspondent. The compound where the women and children died did not yield any remains of the anti-aircraft gun that was supposed to have been firing at the US aircraft.

Is the tragedy of Afghanistan never to end?

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

            The Referendum is come and gone like a ghost in the night, except that it was held in broad daylight and in full public view, though what the General’s men saw and what the rest of us beheld had no more in common than, say, military music and music.

            While one is unable to do anything to stop the gallant governor of the province of Punjab from taking victory laps by helicopter at the taxpayer’s expense, one can only hope he would not let the permanent state of excitement in which he is to be found these days play ducks and drakes with his blood pressure. I am, of course, assuming that he is human and not of divine origin though the way he is going about this business, who can tell! I do not believe in ghosts but I came close to doing so on April 30 after a tour of the polling stations and welcome tents put up by such thoughtful citizens as Humayun Akhtar Khan, “Qaumi Hero” (his description, not mine) Akhtar Rasul, several retired but untired majors and colonels, and prime ministers-in-waiting Mian Muhammad Azhar, Imran Khan, Pervez Elahi, Shujaat Hussain et al. There was not a soul there, except some very sleepy looking men who appeared to have been pulled out of their beds in the middle of the morning.

            One Urdu newspaper columnist, who no doubt is currently under ISI watch, wrote that because the day was particularly hot, there were hardly any flies to swat around for the staff on duty at the outlets so generously set up by the country’s most famous briefcase bearer. There was hardly any traffic on the roads in a city that never seems to sleep or take rest. There were no horns blaring and no screeching tyres one associates with overtaking cars driven by young men on the go. It was an eerie feeling as one went from polling station to polling station in the cantonment and Defence Society area itself. Where were all the voters who thousands of banners were assuring us were in love with President Pervez Musharraf and wanted him to become king emperor for five hundred years and more? Was this what the phrase ‘people voting with their feet’ meant?

            In fear and trepidation, I headed home and switched on the television. Since the Indian channels have been blanked out, there were no gyrating women’s navels to be seen, which was a pity. As patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, PTV is that of bored viewers who have been denied visual access to the temptresses of India who, if Indian channels are to be believed, spend their entire lives dancing on sandy beaches and in lush mountain valleys. But what the PTV was showing was beyond belief. I have seen much public sycophancy in my time but I have never seen a more disgusting and blatant a show of it than that day. Who would have thought it possible, but the PTV had actually excelled itself. Anchor after anchor and so-called PTV correspondent after correspondent kept assuring the viewers that the “enthusiasm” of the people to retain Gen. Musharraf in power was “unprecedented” and milling crowds of wild-with-joy voters were at the polling stations across the country to show their loyal and loving support for the General. One wondered if these paid and unpaid hacks were talking of the country called Pakistan or if they were referring to some cuckooland dreamed up at PTV headquarters by Yusuf Baig Mirza and Syed Anwar Mahmood. If there is a medal going for spineless flattery and the Big Lie, there is no question that PTV will win it hands down. Congratulations to former IBM whiz kid Nisar Memon who thinks the Pakistani press has given him a rough deal by reporting the Referendum accurately.

            I went to the Avari Hotel where every day, Sundays included, gathers for midday tea and conversation a small group of journalists, gentlemen of leisure and men about town. Over the years, whenever I have been in Lahore, I have always joined that table from which have emanated some of the most amusing theories and jokes about people and politics in Pakistan. One of the great wits of Lahore, a true and worthy successor to the prince of Lahore’s boulevardiers, the late Sardar Muhammad Sadiq, is Bhola. When I arrived, Bhola was in full form. On his day, he is like Inzamam-ul-Haq. As runs flow from his bat, great conversation flows from Bhola’s lips. Bhola had already settled the question of how the ballots were to be counted. His theory was that it did not matter whether a ballot was marked yes or no, because it was going to be placed face down and counted as a yes vote.

            At an adjoining table, flanked by his party cabinet, including a most winsome young lady, sat the former Pakistan hockey star Qasim Zia who has revitalised the Pakistan People’s Party in Punjab. “There sits the PPP planning strategy,” somebody said. However, Bhola, as always, had a different point of view. “I am going to phone Benazir in Dubai right now and tell her that her Punjab president is not out on the streets of Lahore fighting off the Referendum but in the airconditioned comfort of Avari hotel, drinking tea. “The Referendum was over the night before,” Qasim Zia said, “It was decided that the General was going to have 60 percent of the eligible vote cast for him, so we are planning the next step.” I must say that the former Pakistan fullback has only been off by four percent which is commendable.

            What surprised me at Avari, however, was a queue of about twenty people in front of the polling booth set up by the management. Bhola, noting the surprise on my face, said, “You can go stand there too, because everyone who votes gets a free cup of tea and a cookie. They are not there for the General but for the cookies. It has even been advertised in the papers.” Since I was already having tea and cookies, I stayed away. But in the afternoon I did vote at a polling station which appeared to be a “bhootoon ka basera”. Though I wasn’t asked for an ID, I did pull mine out. I also pushed forward my thumb so that the yawning agent could put an “indelible” ink mark on it and then in defiance of Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan’s appeal, I stamped the blank circle. (why was only the yes circle green, a color associated with Islam and Pakistan?). I had cast my No vote but the results announced by the government have sinced proved Bhola and Qasim Zia right.

            My no vote has been counted as a yes vote. Gen. Pervez Musharraf zindabad.

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