• Home
• About
• IN MEMORIAM 1934-2009
• Columns
• > Postcard USA
• > Private View
• Longer Pieces
• Books
• Photos
• Contact

Strange things begin to happen when times are out of joint, as they certainly are these days, what with Bush in the White House, Osama bin Laden gone without leaving a forwarding address and Saddam Hussein either here or in the hereafter.

What stage actors, superstitious creatures that they are, call “the Scottish play” and others know as Macbeth has a good deal on this sort of thing. After Macbeth does the deed, a falcon is “hawked” by a mouse and killed, while King Duncan’s horses break out of their stalls and eat each other. The three witches have already appeared to Macbeth and Banquo, having earlier warned a sailor’s wife with chestnuts in her lap that her husband who is gone to Aleppo will find the sea under his boat drained dry as hay.

Well, while the three witches have so far not been seen in Washington, unless the FBI has taken them, like the Secret Service has taken Dick Cheney, to a secret location and turned them over to work for the liberators of Iraq, some odd things are happening here too.

In Syracuse, New York state, after he was thrown out of a bar for being drunk and disorderly — which is part of the fun of drinking — Paul Russell Junior, 33 years of age, allegedly bit Renny, a three-year old German shepherd who works for the police and has never had a bad report. Renny and his handler, Officer William Foster, were out investigating a disturbance in the neighbourhood just as the bar’s bouncers — no-nonsense muscle men of the kind who beat up nosy reporters in Pakistan under instructions from “The Boys” — threw Russell on the pavement.

While both Officer Foster and the good German shepherd Renny were minding their own business, as all policemen should, Russell rose from the ground, where he had been quite rightly chucked, and without provocation grabbed Renny by the throat. He not only started choking it but also bit him on the neck, much to Renny’s surprise as this was the sort of work for which he had been specially trained. “Does this guy want my job?” Renny must have wondered.

In the end, Russell was overpowered by dog and man and charged with injuring a police animal, resisting arrest and causing obstruction of government administration. Trust the police. When it comes to framing charges, it is hard to beat them. Had Russell been booked by the gallant Punjab Police, he would also have been charged with being drunk on illicit liquor, being in possession of contraband marijuana, hiding an unlicensed Mauser on his person and being a member of Al Qaeda.

This is not the only dog story coming out of America this week. Read what happened to another nice dog named Dosha. She was hit by a car, shot in the head and kept in a freezer for two hours but she survived and is now doing well under a veterinarian’s care. Local animal groups and the Humane Society of the United States have begun fund-raising efforts to pay for her care.

This is what happened. Last Tuesday, Dosha was hit by a car. Bob MacDonald, a Clearlake police office, soon appeared on the scene — unlike his Pakistani counterparts who have this amazing gift of becoming invisible when required — and wanted to know who owned the dog. None of those around knew. Dosha meanwhile appeared to be a terminal case. To put the poor thing out of her misery, MacDonald hardened his heart and shot Dosha. She was then removed to Animal Control, an impound facility, where she was put in a freezer, since she appeared to be quite dead.

Two hours later, Denise Johnson, interim director of Animal Control, arrived at the facility, learnt of the incident and went to the freezer to check it out. To her amazement, she found Dosha to be alive, though very, very cold, which is what hypothermia does to you, whether you are man or dog. Dosha also had a gunshot wound, the result of the “humanitarian” (animaltarian?) gesture of Officer MacDonald, but she had no broken bones.

Well, as always happens in such situations, police are said to be “investigating” rather than getting a court order to put Officer MacDonald in that freezer.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Everyone in Pakistan likes to hold forth on Kashmir, though nine out of ten who do so are unfamiliar with Kashmir’s geography. I have it on good authority that when the army took the disastrous Kargil plan to the prime minister for the final go ahead, he asked, “General Sahib, when will we be marching into Srinagar?” Had the prime minister merely looked at a map, he might have noticed that the distance between Kargil and Srinagar was somewhat longer than, say, between Lahore and Raiwind, and the terrain less friendly. No motorway connected the two points either. Alas.

The Northern Areas are an integral part of the Jammu and Kashmir state but it is the Pakistan government that administers them. In 1935 the British, fearful of an expansionist Soviet Union, took a number of steps to strengthen India’s northern borders. Consequently, on 29 March 1935, a 60-year lease under the Treaty of Jammu was signed with Maharaja Hari Singh for 1,300 square miles of what are now called the Northern Areas. The treaty stipulated that the State flag would continue to fly over the leased territory, and that the State would retain the right to exploit the area’s minerals and Baltistan and Astor would remain under the Maharaja’s control.

On the Maharaja’s birthday and other state occasions, the British garrison in Gilgit presented arms by way of yet another acknowledgment of the State’s sovereignty over the leased areas. Before the British transferred power on 14/15 August 1947, the leased territory was returned to the Maharaja who appointed Brig. Ghansara Singh as his governor. So when Pakistan came into being, the Northern Areas were already an integral part of the Jammu and Kashmir state. Census reports from 1911, 1921, 1931 and 1941 also show these areas as part of the state.

After independence, there was a revolt by the Muslim officers and men of the State army and the Gilgit Scouts, commanded by the 24-year old Scotsman Maj. William Brown. The uprising began on 31 October. The Governor was arrested, as were some non-Muslim soldiers and the Pakistan flag was raised at the Gilgit residency. What happened in Gilgit was unrelated to what we know as the Poonch uprising. Nor did it have anything to do with the entry of tribesmen into the State, a reckless and fatal act that sealed the fate of Kashmir in India’s favour. The Quaid-e-Azam knew nothing about the tribal incursion, it should be added. According to K. H. Khurshid, when he asked Liaquat Ali Khan in Lahore in 1949 if the Quaid had been asked, the Prime Minister remained silent because being a man of honour, he did not want to tell an untruth.

While Pakistan assumed direct control of the Northern Areas, a term unknown before 1947, it chose to administer them until the early 1970s under the notorious Frontier Crimes Regulations. The joint secretary of the Kashmir Affairs ministry replaced the British resident, exercising absolute authority and paying viceroy-like visits to the territory off and on, more for the sake of partridge shoots and perhaps Hunza water than the welfare of the people who lived there on the edge of starvation. It was not until the Karakorum Highway was built in 1978 that the economic conditions of the population improved to some extent. The assumption of control by Pakistan of the Northern Areas is based on the so-called Karachi Agreement which is of doubtful legality, signed as it was by Chaudhri Ghulam Abbas in 1949 in his capacity as head of the Muslim Conference. The Agreement did nothing to secure or advance the rights of the people who lived in the region, nor were they asked. No copy of this Agreement exists in government records. Pakistan’s administrative control over the territory, thus, has little basis in law.

While the Karachi Agreement clearly recognised that the Northern Areas were a part of Azad Kashmir, the writ of the Azad Kashmir government was not allowed to run there. Every Pakistani government, civilian or military, has treated the region as a part of Pakistan but without giving the residents their basic rights. There is a Northern Areas Council but its role is advisory. The people have no recourse to courts either in Azad Kashmir or Pakistan. Under the Pakistan-China boundary agreement of 2 March 1962, Pakistan transferred 2,500 square miles of Hunza south of Mintaka Pass to Beijing, an act that undermines Pakistan’s stand on Kashmir. A provision in the treaty about renegotiating the situation in the event of a change in the status quo does nothing to strengthen Pakistan’s right to have transferred territory to China that did not belong to it.

The agreement does recognise though that the territory transferred to China is part of the State. However, the people and government of Azad Kashmir were not consulted when the agreement was signed. Pakistan’s stand is self-contradictory. It prevents the Azad Kashmir government from administering the area while maintaining that the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir is disputed territory under UNCIP resolutions. Elsewhere, Islamabad has maintained that the Northern Areas are part of Pakistan. A map issued by the Pakistan government showed the areas as part of Pakistan. In 1972, the Azad Kashmir Assembly passed a resolution demanding the return of the Northern Areas which had been taken over “temporarily” by Pakistan under the Karachi agreement. The resolution was ignored by Islamabad. It may be added that to this day, the AK Chief Secretary and the IG of Police have to be Pakistani officers “lent” to the Azad Kashmir government. So much then for trust in the Kashmiris.

The Benazir Bhutto government brought in a package of “reforms” which were seen in Azad Kashmir as an attempt to delink the areas from Azad Kashmir. The Kashmir Liberation League called the “reforms” a scheme to divide Kashmir. The Karachi Agreement was repealed by the 1970 Act, which in turn was rendered redundant by the 1974 Act. In 1990, a writ petition was filed in the Azad Kashmir High Court to clarify the status of the Northern Areas, with the governments of Pakistan and Azad Kashmir named as respondents. The Pakistan government took the contradictory position that although the areas were not part of Pakistan under the 1973 constitution, neither were they part of Azad Kashmir. The Azad Kashmir government was pressured into taking the strange position that the writ petition was not “maintainable.”

The court rejected Pakistan’s plea that Muzaffarabad had no jurisdiction “outside” Azad Kashmir. The judgment delivered by the court said, “We have recapitulated the detailed history of the Northern Areas, their legal status and the circumstances surrounding the present position. We, therefore, hold that no legitimate cause has been shown by the respondents No. 1 and No. 2 to keep the Northern Areas and their residents (State subjects) detached from Azad Jammu and Kashmir, under (a) separate and arbitrary administrative system and deprive them of fundamental rights. We accordingly accept the petition and direct that the Azad government immediately assume the administrative control of the Northern Areas and annex it with the administration of Azad Jammu and Kashmir … the residents of the Northern Areas shall enjoy the benefits of the fundamental rights conferred by the Act 1974 … The Azad Government shall take steps to establish administrative and judicial set-up in the Northern Areas within the framework of the Interim Constitution Act.”

This landmark judgment was the subject of an appeal in the Azad Kashmir Supreme Court which decided that while Gilgit and Baltistan were an integral part of the former state of Jammu and Kashmir, they were not part of Azad Kashmir. The court did not, however, state that they were part of Pakistan either. Ironically, the AK High Court whose judgment had been overturned had anticipated this and observed at para 194 of its judgment that to hold that the Northern Areas were not part of Azad Kashmir nor a part of Pakistan was self-contradictory. So even under the higher court’s judgment, Pakistan’s takeover of these areas is without legal or constitutional authority.

If people in Pakistan have begun to wonder why Pakistan’s word on Kashmir is no longer taken seriously by the world, all they have to do is look at the ambivalent and self-serving policies successive Pakistani governments have followed to control and manipulate the “base camp” of the Kashmir liberation movement. Some movement, some camp, is all I can say.

The destruction of the Iraqi antiquities, I pointed out to Gen. Richard B. Meyers, chairman US Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a press conference on 15 April at the Foreign Press Centre in Washington had been described as the greatest cultural catastrophe in human history. “I would like to know,” I added, “how it was allowed to happen, especially when the Pentagon had repeated warnings that these antiquities needed to be protected because they were the heritage of the entire mankind.”

This was the General’s reply, “I think what I would say to somebody who said that this is the greatest catastrophe in human history that you would probably find some Iraqis who may say that watching their son or daughter or brother or wife tortured in front of them might be a greater catastrophe. So I think we need to keep this in perspective. Obviously, if antiquities were destroyed, it’s not a good thing. But in war you have your priorities … We worked very hard with archeologists and other historians who knew where a lot of the sites were in Iraq … And the coalition made every effort not to strike those sites. And so that’s part of the care, I think, you see in this. Clearly, when you’re in Baghdad, where some of this activity took place, you’re in there for combat. And so you prosecute combat. At the same time — that museum was being looted, perhaps by criminals — we had Americans being wounded and dying in Baghdad. So your priorities, of course, are to finish the combat task.”

When an Egyptian journalist pointed out that the Iraqi oil ministry had been fully protected, Gen. Meyers said, “Whether one ministry or another was protected or not protected, I can’t answer that. I don’t think there were any priorities like that. I think it was probably more opportunistic, depending on what sector various buildings and ministries and things were. Clearly, one of the things we’re very interested in is gathering intelligence on terrorists and on weapons of mass destruction and on regime behavior towards the Iraqi people. So where we think those documents and so forth are, we are going to devote some effort to getting at them.”

He did not explain why he thought information on terrorists and weapons of mass destruction (that may be found perhaps in a week of Sundays) was being kept at the oil ministry. A Pentagon spokesman seemed to rationalise what has sent shock waves around the world of art and culture by arguing that the military had never promised that the buildings housing the antiquities would be protected. The looters, whoever they were, systematically and with the greatest professionalism divested 28 galleries and vaults of their priceless and irreplaceable treasures, over 50,000 in number. They used glass cutters, bypassed reproductions in favour of originals and carted off pieces weighing hundreds of pounds. The looters knew what they were doing.

Oxford professor Eleanor Robson put the event in perspective, though Gen. Meyers would not see it that way, “You’d have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258 to find looting on this scale.” The looters knew what they were doing.

How did this happen? A military machine that had the capability of singling out individual sites for obliteration without doing the least harm to their immediate vicinity could surely have saved – or annihilated – anything it wished to, including the national museum in Baghdad or the national library that also met the same fate. Thanks to highly sophisticated satellite imaging techniques, every single inch of Iraq had been photographed by the Pentagon and a host of US intelligence agencies in the most minute detail. Why was the museum then allowed to be vandalised? Witnesses said some American soldiers had come to the site, stayed for half an hour and then left.

How does one stop short of concluding that the destruction and pillaging of Iraq’s antiquities was a deliberate act? The only question one is unable to answer is why.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Abdulla Malik is dead. The last of the comrades is gone. When he turned 81, I wrote of him, “Abdulla Malik is like that famous brew. He is in his 81st year and still going strong. Some time ago, he stopped reading newspapers so one is not sure he will read this.” Later I found out that he had, or been told of it, which only proved what someone had once said to me, “You could print something about a person in a newspaper with a circulation of no more than 10 copies but you can be sure he will come to know of it even if he were living in the farthest corner of the earth.”

Before Abdulla Malik stopped reading newspapers altogether, he stopped reading Urdu columnists. He found them enervating, bad for his peace of mind, and even worse for his sense of well-being. Newspapers he may have stopped reading but nobody was better informed than him. Whenever Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to Lahore, before or after taking power, he would take Abdulla Malik aside and ask, “So, Abdulla tell me what is going on?”

There was no one more youthful than Abdulla Malik. He was a man with a passion for life and for the causes he believed in. He was also consistent in his beliefs, unlike the turncoats and conscience sellers who have flourished in Pakistan. He became a communist as a teenager and he remained one till the day he died. Even after the fall of communism, he kept the faith.

When he led a delegation of writers to China some years ago, I said to him, “Malik sahib, this is what I call faithlessness. Since your first love, the Soviet Union, is no longer around, you have found a new beloved.” He laughed. “Look,” he said, “if there were no Soviet Union, there would be no People’s Republic of China.”

Like Manto, I always find it hard to remember when I met whom for the first time but I do know that I met Abdulla Malik several years before I began to work for The Pakistan Times in 1967. When he was banished to London as correspondent for Imroze and The Times – courtesy his old friend the late Altaf Gauhar who managed to save him, as he saved Syed Amjad Hussain, chief reporter of The Times, from a posting to Khuzdar or Kalat – we had a correspondence going.

In London, he used to hang out with Athar Ali at the BBC, a lifelong friend whose sudden death in 1995 devastated him. Abdulla Malik was a man of abiding affections. Those who measured up to his test of friendship, he loved. For him they could do no wrong. When they did do wrong, which they invariably did, he forgave them.

Whenever I would come to Lahore, my first call would be at 134 Tipu Block, New Garden Town. I would push open the black wrought-iron gate, walk on to the veranda and shout “Malik sahib”. He would answer in Punjabi, “Aa gya vain” [So you’ve come]. We would talk for hours and hours. At some point he would say, “Kala Kutta vi maujood wai” [Black Dog is also present]. That was his shorthand for something to drink, Kala Kutta being the literal translation of Black Dog, old General Yahya Khan’s favourite brew. Black Beauty, Black Dog, Black Label. And there in three names you have the story of the break-up of Pakistan in 1971.

Abdulla Malik loved the company of friends and he loved arguments but though he would defend his viewpoint with passion and vigour, he was never combative or bitter. Most Pakistani arguments end in fights. Abdulla Malik, being a Kakkaizai Pathan, was not averse to a fight but not because someone disagreed with him.

I recall a long summer afternoon in 1968 when several of us sat in the cool, dimly lit, highly convivial basement bar of the Hotel Ambassador, our host being the late Sheikh Muhammad Naseem of PIA public relations and earlier of The Times. At one point, Abdulla Malik said to me, “Go phone my home and tell my wife that I was rushed to Gujranwala to cover a story for Imroze.” I did exactly what I had been told in my most credible voice. That good lady heard me out, asked how I was and then added, “May I speak to Malik sahib for a minute.”

Two years ago, when Ahmed Nadeem Qasimi said disparaging things about Faiz Ahmed Faiz in an interview, the man who first sprang to Faiz’s defence was Abdulla Malik, writing a series of hard-hitting articles. In a letter dated May 30, 2001, to me he writes, “I am planning to write a few more articles to disprove all the untruths Qasimi has told. That does not necessarily mean that Faiz’s personality was of legendary proportions, because, after all, who can be more aware of the missteps he took than us, one major example being the selection of Dr Ayub Mirza as his biographer. Some of the people he chose as his friends and some of those in whom he placed his trust caused him much unhappiness, but I am happy that I was the first in this crusade in defence of Faiz. Perhaps we have repaid the debt we owed him. It has also given Faiz a new life.”

When Abdulla Malik published the first part of his autobiography two years ago, I wrote that even at the age of 81 were Abdulla Malik to hear a protesting crowd marching on the street outside his home, he would drop whatever he was doing, rush out and join them. He would be not among the stragglers but out front, ready to take on the world.

The book covered the first 27 years of his life. He wrote: “The 27 years that this story covers were like a turbulent, shore-less sea which carried thousands of rising and falling tides inside its vast bosom. I lived those 27 years to the hilt. I felt reverentially drawn to the great religious scholars of the day. Then I fell under the spell of the firebrand leaders of the Majlis-e-Ahrar … I am a witness to the emergence of communism among the students of my day, I joined the Party and volunteered to become a fulltime worker for the Cause.”

He never turned his back on that Cause. He once said to me, “Communism is not the name of a country. It is an idea and the idea is justice for the people. That idea cannot die.”

Nor can Abdulla Malik.

Do you know who President Bush’s political and military adviser is? Not Cheney or Rummy or Wolfie, not even that Condi lady, but ol’ Ed Anger who lives in sunny Florida

The times are out of joint, so is it any wonder that we now have a talking fish, and not only a talking fish, but a fish that likes to be interviewed by the press. Of all the fishy stories you may have heard, this one should be the fishiest.

After I saw Saddam Hussein’s statue being pulled down from where it stood, high over the skyline of the city of Baghdad, I switched off my television. Over the last few weeks, all of us have had enough of TV talking heads, both in Pakistan and America. The American ones, I have watched; the Pakistani ones I have read about on the Internet with increasing disbelief. In the department of military geniuses, the names of Generals Aslam Beg, Hamid Gul and Talat Masood no doubt deserve to be inscribed in letters of gold. The viewers of Pakistani television channels surely understand now why our performance in the three and a quarter wars we have fought has been so scintillating.

But that fishy story first. According to the Weekly World News, available at every major grocery checkout in America for a couple of dollars (which’s called value for money), in the town of New Square, New York state, a carp which (or should we say who) likes to be called Paul has been making frightening predictions. Paul was heard talking in a hatchery where sometime earlier, one of her talking fish cousins had been slaughtered by a butcher because he had a wife who did all the talking he could handle on a working day.

Paul is obviously a fish with very right-wing views. Look what he said before he was taken to a top secret research lab where millions of dollars will be spent to find out if he can be used as a weapon of mass destruction or some such. Paul says the day of atonement is upon us and all men must make their peace with the Maker. Asked why he had come forward at this time of all times, Paul replied that he was worried about the war in Iraq. According to Paul (and he is as wrong as the Bushies), the Iraqis have very powerful weapons, the likes of which have not been seen before. He also thinks Saddam “walks with the devil”, which is odd, if true, because old Nick could not be much of a walking companion.

However, my favourite American columnist is Ed Anger who writes for the same paper where Paul’s interview appeared. Ed is angry. To know why, read on. “I am madder than Roy Rogers with a busted guitar at all these filthy foreigners whining about how Americans are a bunch of cowboys. These yahoos think we’re the bad guys and that the real problem in the world today is American Imperialism, not that nutcase Saddam… Well, folks, I say it’s high time for Uncle Sam to proudly tell the world he is a cowboy. A bad —- (the word for donkey) cowboy who’s not afraid to shoot first and ask questions afterward is exactly what the world needs right now to get rid of tough hombres like Saddam and all those murdering terrorists thugs.”

Ed Anger does not mince his words. “Let’s come right out and say there’s a new sheriff in town, buckaroos. And I am not talking about a squeaky clean lawman like the Lone Ranger who used to shoot the guns out of bad guys’ hands with a silver bullet. I mean a modern-day Clint Eastwood type cowboy who growls, ‘Make my day’ before pumping six shots into some creep’s back… I mean it, gang. From now on, any of these fool countries step out of line, we shove the biggest nuke in our arsenal right up its old wazoo. It’s no more Mr Nice Guy. Nice guys finish last — just ask Jimmy Carter. So let’s cut out this malarky about begging the UN on our hands and knees like some Third World dump before going to war. Next time, just bomb the hell out of the turkeys and get it over with… When Ancient Rome was the baddest dude on the block, there was peace in Europe for hundreds of years.”

So now you know who President Bush’s political and military adviser is. Not Cheney or Rummy or Wolfie, not even that Condi lady, but ol’ Ed Anger who lives in sunny Florida.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

It is thirty-two years since the Indian Airlines flight that had taken off from Srinagar on the morning of January 30 for Delhi was hijacked and brought to Lahore by two young Kashmiris cousins, Hashim and Ashraf Qureshi. The official Pakistani story has been that the Ganga hijacking was elaborately planned by Indian intelligence to be used as an excuse to ban Pakistani aircraft flying over India in order to keep its beleaguered garrison from being supplied. Hashim and Ashraf were denounced as Indian agents, although when they brought the plane to Lahore they were greeted as heroes and freedom fighters. On a popular level they continued to be seen like.

I was at the time a reporter working for The Pakistan Times and just happened to be at Lahore airport when the plane landed. In the first few days, there was no bar to us walking across the tarmac and talking to the two hijackers. Later, however, our access was blocked. I was also present when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto arrived from Dhaka. A crowd had gathered at the airport. And many among them had jumped over the railing to greet the PPP leader. I was already on the tarmac. They wanted Bhutto to go towards Ganga. Bhutto said to me, “Look, I don’t know what this is all about and who these people are, so I won’t say anything.” He was practically pushed towards the parked aircraft by the crowd. He exchanged a few words with the two young men.

The late Aftab Ahmed Khan was then head of the India desk at the Foreign Office and had remained in Lahore throughout the episode. He also briefed the press where we subjected him to some hard questioning. Years later in London I asked him about Ganga. He said it had been set on fire by the ISI. On the day that happened, he told me, he was disallowed access to the plane. Even the West Pakistan chief secretary, Afzal Agha, a Srinagar Kashmiri, could not get through. Both Hashim and Ashraf were later tried and sentenced, the special court having found them to have been “Indian agents”.

My cousin KH Khurshid appeared as a witness in that case. His testimony which I saw for the first time a few days ago sheds new light on this strange event and separates truth from the falsehood in which it has so far been kept wrapped by the Pakistani establishment. Khurshid, who was personal secretary to the Quaid-e-Azam from June 1944 until the Quaid’s death in 1948, told the court that he had arrived at the airport on February 2, 1971, at about 7.00pm having been told that the situation was tense and that PIA had stopped its daily supply of food to the hijackers.

The late Jammu and Kashmir National Liberation Front (JKNLF) leader Maqbul Butt arrived in Lahore from Peshawar. Muslehuddin, who was working for PTV News, and I were the first people to meet him and we briefed him about the situation. We also helped arrange his press conference at the Hotel International. The hijackers Hashim and Ashraf had asked to meet Butt. Sardar Abdul Vakil Khan, the SSP of Lahore, took Khurshid and Maqbul to a room where Hashim sat with some officials. He told Butt that “these men” were telling him to set fire to the plane. Butt said that would be unwise.

As Khurshid and Maqbul were being escorted out, the SSP said, “ Khuda ke liye hamari jaan chhorh do, jahaz ko urha do” [For God’s sake spare us and destroy the plane]. And that is what happened, but not at the hands of the hijackers.

After the destruction of Ganga, the two hijackers were taken away. In the next few days, Maqbul and the entire leadership of JKNLF was arrested and tried for “treason”. All these brave and innocent men remained in jail for two years and were finally released by the Lahore High Court which called them “patriots fighting for the liberation of their motherland”. However, Hashim was not released until 1980 and only after he won his appeal in the Supreme Court of Pakistan.

While Ashraf stayed on in Pakistan, Hashim settled in Europe. He returned to India a couple of years ago and was arrested for the 1971 hijacking. What kind of an “agent” then was Hashim Qureshi who was jailed by both India and Pakistan?

In my view, it establishes that he was a Kashmiri patriot. The theory that India arranged the hijacking because it wanted to ban Pakistani over-flights makes no sense as India could have banned the over-flights anyway by merely saying that the Yahya regime was ferrying troops and arms to crush the people of East Pakistan – which it was - and India did not wish to be party to it.

Hashim had crossed into Pakistan a couple of years earlier and met Maqbul. When he was crossing back, he was picked up, interrogated and released. One Indian account says he “confessed” that he had been trained by Pakistan to hijack an Indian plane and agreed to become a double, another story that makes no sense. You don’t need “training” to hijack a Dakota, just a toy gun which is what the two cousins had when they hijacked Ganga. Another cock and bull story floated by MB Sinha, a former Indian intelligence officer, in a book said that Hashim agreed to “hijack” an Indian plane to Pakistan, befriending Maqbul Butt and infiltrating JKNLF.

This is absolute nonsense because the total JKNLF cadre could be counted on the fingers of one hand. If that was all India wanted, it could simply have sent an agent or two to Pakistan instead of getting one of its own planes hijacked. According to Sinha’s book, Hashim was instructed not to hand over control of the plane to Pakistan but to insist that he would only do so if Bhutto came to meet him and his comrade. This, says, the author with a rather rich imagination, was to establish his credibility with “his Pakistani masters and help India at the same time”. This is another ridiculous claim because first, Hashim never made any such demand and second, Bhutto’s meeting the hijackers was accidental. Sinha goes on to say that Hashim was instructed to blow up the plane after meeting Bhutto, which is utter rubbish because the plane was blown up not by Hashim, who had no means of doing so, but by the ISI.

In April 2001, Hashim Qureshi wrote to a Jammu newspaper after it published a fanciful article about the Ganga hijacking that he was and remained a Kashmiri patriot working for an independent Kashmir. He quoted KH Khurshid in his defence. Why did Yahya’s military destroy the plane? Because by then it had decided to jettison East Pakistan and also because it was inept beyond belief with some very strange notions.

Hashim, who has since been released, has turned pacifist but he still believes that Kashmir should be independent of both India and Pakistan, a position no patriotic Kashmiri differs with. It is time Kashmir stopped being treated as a choice piece of real estate by the two states.

For some the war has been good news. Retired American generals for example. There is gainful employment for many of them. We have only one Hamid Gul and we complain. There are dozens of them on American television and no one complains

Spring is here and the blossoms have sprouted, as if by magic, from branches that were bare until the other day. The snow that was here last week is now only a memory. The birds have returned after their long absence. Your spirits should lift as you hear them break into song, but that doesn’t happen because the shadow of war hangs over this country, a war without moral, political or military justification, declared by a militaristic minority of men — and one woman — caught up in their own fantasy of redrawing the map of the Middle East, and eventually perhaps, the rest of the world.

It is hard to believe that the new millennium has begun with the return of imperialism, that aggression is being committed in the name of democracy and human rights, that a whole country is being pulverised so that it can be brought freedom. Is it the same philosophy that General Pervez Musharraf had in mind when he said: you have to bring in the army to keep it out? The white man’s burden has returned. George Bush will civilise Iraq. He will give the people of that country a democratic government. He will first find, then destroy those weapons of mass destruction that UN inspectors could not find after weeks of extensive searches from one corner of the country to the other. But make no mistake. The weapons will be found and it will be on prime time television in living colour. And you better believe what you are shown on television otherwise you might be invaded next for your own good.

The way this war has been played out on American television is nothing short of disgraceful. Why are the big networks bragging that the coverage they are bringing their viewers is “historic”? What is historic about it? All right, there are camera crews ensconced in tanks as they run through the desert. You see in sickly green what is visible to the occupants through the turret. How does it help you make any more sense of this war than you would have otherwise? News is being brought to the world through “embedded” reporters. An embedded reporter, it goes without saying, will report what those who have embedded him want him to report. So it is managed war coverage. You see what the commanders and agencies want you to see.

If you fall out of line like Peter Arnett, you are fired. And what did Arnett do? He appeared on Iraqi television and said that America’s Plan I had failed because of unexpected Iraqi resistance and a new Plan was being cobbled together. That in the super patriotic atmosphere engendered here by the unquestioning American media is high treason. So off with his head. So much then for freedom of the press. Coverage of the war continues round the clock. I wake up at odd hours of the night and switch the set on and see the same thing I have seen during the day. This war is being played like a video game.

Iraqi prisoners have been shown on television but no one has invoked the Geneva Conventions. Again, Iraqis have been castigated because their soldiers are said to have gone into combat wearing civilian clothes. What about the scores of agents, spies and special service operatives infiltrated into Iraq long before the war began, and after? What were they dressed in? Marine Corps uniforms?

For some the war has been good news. Retired American generals for example. There is gainful employment for many of them. We have only one Hamid Gul and we complain. There are dozens of them on American television and no one complains. That old proverb about a dead elephant being of even greater value than a living one I never believed. Now I do.

There is a new spring in President Bush’s gait. Soon he will be Master of the Universe. Once this Iraq business is over, one may ask him to turn his attention to Pakistan. There are a couple of chaps out there we would all be better off without. I even have a name for it. Operation Khaki Rubout.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

His heaviness can relax, though that’s all he seems to do since he was miraculously transformed from a covering candidate for his son to the prime minister of the republic. The country’s problems only superficially appear to be economic or political or defence-related. They all have to do with the exotic ailments that its population from Baba Island, Karachi to the Landi Kotal smugglers’ bazaar suffers from, unbeknownst to all except the sign-painters of the land. Considering how there is no wall in Pakistan that hasn’t served as canvas to the practitioners of this art, there may be undiscovered career prospects for the young in this area.

The prime minister does not look like a man who takes walks; otherwise he may have been lighter of step than he is. Since he was installed in office, he has been flown around or driven in limos with darkened glass windows. It is, therefore, unlikely that he would see what the rest of us do every time we leave home. The handiwork of the sign-painters is especially on view during intercity travel. The old Grand Trunk Road is where it’s at. The Motorway, Mian Nawaz Sharif’s agreeable though financially disastrous gift to the nation, is free of these works of art since it snakes over miles and miles of wilderness with no wall in sight.

I would advise His Heaviness to take a road trip with the window glass down from any one city to any other city, say Rawalpindi to Lahore, and see for himself what ails the people of Pakistan. He will discover that every wall, every available surface, every bit of space on every standing structure is plastered with health messages. And what uplifting messages they are. You are told not to despair. Mistakes of early youth and their injurious effects can be reversed. You can be young and strong again, especially if you are a male because “the male never grows old”. One visit and you can be back in the pink of health, your system cleansed of all signs and traces of your debilitating ailments. Just seek help from the nearest health clinic that uses German Methods to cure whatever ails you.

These magic places where every disease known to man can be cured by just a simple visit are to be found in Lahore, Rawalpindi, Karachi, Multan, Faisalabad, Sialkot or wherever you look or go. That is where the fountains of everlasting youth gush happily. Male inadequacy, a far greater problem in Pakistan than waterlogging, salinity or atmospheric pollution, is No 1 on the list. Perhaps all the instability that has plagued Pakistan since its birth flows from this one, single ailment. Maybe it is not instability at all but inadequacy. I wonder if the Council of Islamic Ideology, which is fighting a gallant battle against the onset of the eighth century AD, has any idea what we are dealing with here.

Unfortunately, I have not paid a visit to these bubbling springs of youth out of a fear of being found out. Can someone, in the meanwhile, please explain why that overrated blue pill is being sold under the counter for the equivalent of an air ticket from Lahore to Rawalpindi when we have the German-Greek Clinic of Eternal Youth and the Hamdania Miracle Hospital for those whom the world had given up for dead. I think some of us who are trying to eke out a living through hack writing in the language of the departed Brits should consider employment as ushers at one of these places. Newspapers pay poorly and are always closing down. These places, like the fountains of youth that play inside their walls, are there to stay.

Having read every surface and wall from Lahore to Peshawar, I have come to believe that every Pakistani citizen also suffers from amoebic dysentery, blood piles, chronic indigestion, terminal dyspepsia, insomnia, urethral infection, premature release of vital fluids, inability to match desire with performance, creeping blindness, muscular dystrophy, swollen ankles, hypertension, slipped disks, heartburn, chronic constipation and loss of sanity, to name just a few.

As for what ails the female population of this country, I am unable to print that in a publication that children might pick up and read. However, all that the curious have to do is to drive down any major road and keep their eyes open. By the time they come back home, they will be an authority on what are delicately described as “hidden lady ailments”.

Other cures on offer – and for that one turns to our Urdu dailies – are described in these words in one of them. “Amazing success in everything, and you don’t even have to step out of your front door. In only three days, all shall be accomplished. Send no money, but once your heart’s desire is fulfilled, we will suggest a tribute of your choice. There is no compulsion. We are here to serve the human race. If you have given up hope and none of the charms and amulets you obtained earlier has worked, try what this humble sinner has to offer. God willing, all your problems will be solved, all difficulties overcome. Just look at what I can deliver: success in examination, prosperity in business, permanent riddance from bad habits, fertility for the sterile, marriage of choice, complete subjugation of that flint-hearted beloved (she will come gift-wrapped to you in breakable thread) etc. I will recite certain special and secret prayers on your behalf and mail you a sacred amulet by VPP. Yes, when you write, don’t forget to mention your mother’s name and what your heart desires. All correspondence is strictly confidential.”

And since practically the entire male population of Pakistan is lovelorn, here is an ad from one Urdu newspaper. “Finally available. The Great Amulet of Love. For the control and subjugation of your object of love. The amulet resolves all difficulties, overcomes all hurdles. And it is free, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters. If you are love-sick, short of money, if your life is marred by successive failures, there is no need to give in and admit defeat. In two days, we guarantee, the most hardhearted beloved will become your slave. In three days, all impediments to the marriag of your choice will stand removed. Send us a self-addressed envelope. Write in confidence to Aastana-e-Qalandar, Post Box 420, Lahore.”

You can also increase your height, cure your baldness, get rid of chronic aches and pains, whiten your dark complexion, grow ampler in the right places (for ladies only) and transform your blotchy skin into one of translucent beauty. Maybe we should request Aastana-e-Qalandar to send us an amulet that will rid us of Army League, Pakistan’s most powerful political party.

Comments