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The profession of journalism has always attracted colourful, eccentric characters. Some of them have combined that talent with a hard nose for ferreting out the truth, which, everyone knows, may have its own reward in heaven but is vastly unpopular on earth.

On rare occasions, journalism has also attracted men of wisdom who have served the highest cause of all — that of public interest. America has produced both. The greatest journalist of all in the select league of the wise was Walter Lippmann, who once wrote that journalists should avoid the proximity and friendship of those who wield power because to such men any pause in flattery is tantamount to disloyalty. These are not his exact words, but this is the gist of his observation.

We in Pakistan have not been without such men, though when one looks around today and surveys the scene, one finds few if any in that great tradition. The Hamid Nizamis, the Mazhar Ali Khans, the Nisar Usmanis, the I H Burneys, the Razia Bhattis are all gone. These men and women had both wisdom and courage and they knew no fear. Some of them are remembered on certain days of the year, but what is left forgotten is what they stood for and what they exemplified through their life and work.

There are two great American journalists whom I would like to mention this week. The prince of them all was Walter Lippmann who wrote, “The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master’s ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.”

Writing about leadership, Lippmann said, “The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.” On another occasion, he wrote, “The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.”

The other day when I read the declaration of the spokesman-in-chief (S-in-C) of this government that since his party had a majority, it would show everyone how government was run, with or without opposition, I wished he could be told of what Lippmann had written over half a century ago on this subject. The maestro said, “In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.” However, no matter how hard I try, I do not see S-in-C reading Walter Lippmann.

From Lippmann, let me move to R W Apple Jr who has reported politics, war, peace, travel, food, architecture and whatever is reportable for the New York Times for the last 40 years. Calvin Trillin, writing about him this week in the New Yorker, quotes Jim Wooten of ABC who said “we have simply grown used to Apple,” then added, “It’s like having a big Labrador dog. He knocks over the lamp with his tail. He slobbers on everything. But you still love him.” Apple travels grandly and eats prodigiously. One of his colleagues once said that Johnny Apple had the best mind and the worst body in American journalism.

Apple is a master of what is known at the New York Times as the “lead-all”, which is a composite piece that synthesises various aspects of an important story. His other great specialty is the news analysis piece that the Times calls the Q-head. Pakistani journalism, which has more columnists than a tin of sardines has sardines, would do well to pay attention to what Johnny Apple said when asked why he did not write a column. “I’m not very good at writing columns in which I say what this country needs or what the world needs is the following. I see two sides to too many things.”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

I met Fayyaz Hashmi, the great poet and lyricist of the Indian-Pakistani cinema and entertainment industry only once and now regret that I made no attempt to meet him again. It was in Lahore in 1968 or thereabouts and it was at the offices of a company that supplied hydropower plants and components to Wapda. I used to drop in there off and on to see a couple of friends. That day, there he was, a dark thick-set man wearing dark glasses, sitting in a chair quietly drinking tea. What he was doing there I have no idea. “This is Fayyaz Hashmi,” my friend said. I registered nothing. We shook hands. My friend spoke again, “Yes, the Fayyaz Hashmi.” The penny dropped. There in front of me sat one of the all-time greats of the music industry with few, if any, equals. Pakistan did not treat him well, as it did not treat Saadat Hasan Manto or “Prince of Minerva Movietone” Sadiq Ali or Mumtaz Shanti or Rehana or Meena Shorey, the “ lara lappa” girl, well.

What follows about Hashmi and two others is based on the research work of movie encyclopedist extraordinaire, my friend Muhammad Rafiq of Southend-on-Sea in Essex, England.

Fayyaz Hashmi was born in Calcutta in 1920 and it is a shame that his name is never mentioned among those acknowledged to stand in the first rank, nor has the industry to which his contribution is immense, or the state which he chose to become a citizen of, recognised his work. He started life with the Gramophone Company of India and in 1947 on his insistence he was sent to organise the derelict music scene in Pakistan. Lahore, which was the third important EMI centre after Calcutta and Bombay, lay in ruins, so he began to bring together instrumentalists and vocalists of merit, some of whom had come from the other side of the great divide. To him goes the credit for the first recordings made in Lahore after the maelstrom of 1947 and he it was who brought to the fore Munawwar Sultana (not the actress), Farida Khanum and Zeenat Begum, among many others.

His father, a writer and director, worked for Madan Theatre and they lived in Hayat Khan Lane in Calcutta, next to Agha Hashr Kaashmiri, the “Indian Shakespeare”. Fayyaz imbibed the literary and artistic spirit at the gatherings that took place at their home which Agha Hashr attended regularly. At the age of 13 or 14, he wrote a ghazal that was very well received. Then Master Fida Hussain sang another of the boy wonder’s ghazals that also became a hit from one end of India to the other. ( Qadr kisi ki hum ne na jaani: Haa’i mohabbat haa’i jawani).

He was 20 when the Gramophone Company of India employed him as its resident lyricist. The music director of the company was the great Kamal Dasgupta with whom Fayyaz formed a long and memorable creative association. Fayyaz wrote the first song that Talat Mahmood sang in 1941 ( Sab din ek samaan nahin tha) and the runaway hit Tasveer teri dil mera behla na sakay gi. He also wrote the immortal Pankhij Malik song Ye raatain, ye mausam and the first Urdu/Hindi songs for Hemant Kumar, Juthika Roy, Feroza Begum and Jagmohan. In all, he wrote more than 500 non-film songs, each one of which defines a human situation poignantly, romantically. He also wrote lyrics for a large number of movies, both in India and Pakistan. The good news is that he is alive but I am not sure if he lives in Lahore, Karachi or elsewhere. There is time yet to honour him nationally.

The two other greats who remain all but forgotten are the sweet-voiced Bengali singer Feroza Begum, one of the great exponents of Nazrul Geeti. Born in Faridpur district, now in Bangladesh, she showed promise at an early age and was just eight when she won a place on the Children’s Corner programme of All India Radio, Calcutta. Her first record was cut by Columbia when she was barely 12. She received her early training from Chitta Roy who taught her a number of Nazrul Islam songs. She also began to explore other forms, including ghazal and light classical. She reached full flowering under the great Kamal Dasgupta who also set some of Nazrul’s poetry to music. Kamal Dasgupta was born in Jassore district in 1912 and started out with the Gramophone Company of India for which he made music history, writing compositions for such immortals as Pankaj Malik, Juthika Roy and Kanan Devi, Kalyani Das, Jagmohan and Hemant Kumar. His most memorable films as music director were Jawab ( Aye chand chhup na jana by Kanan Devi) and Hospital ( Meri majbooryoon nain mera daaman chaak kar dala by Kanan Devi). Fayyaz Hashmi wrote the lyrics.

Kamal Dasgupta felt ignored in the years after independence. He found it hard to accept the neglect he faced once his great work was done and then forgotten. He and Fayyaz Hashmi earned vast sums of money for the cinema and the record industry, not to mention the pleasure and happiness they brought to the viewing and listening millions, but as time passed, they were thrown on the slag heap and assigned to oblivion as if they had never existed. Forgotten stood the man who had written such undying tunes as the Kanan Devi hits Prabhoo ji, Prabhoo ji tum mano baat hamari, Yeh dunaya Toofan Mail, Ai chand chhup na jana, or Jagmohan’s O varsha ke pehle baadal or Kamla Jharya’s Na tum meray, na dil mera, na jaan-e-na’tawaan meri. He was a man of few words. A faint smile from him meant that the artist’s rendition had pleased him. Juthiki Roy waited all her life to hear a word of praise from him.

Kamal Dasgupta left Calcutta sometime in the 1960s and came to Dhaka where he converted to Islam, taking the name Kamal Islam, before marrying Feroza Begum whom he must have always loved. He did not work or he wrote no music. They had three children. He died in Dhaka in 1974, unsung and unremembered. Feroza Begum, who was younger, lives in Dhaka. In 1971, in a letter to a friend, Kamal Dasgupta wrote in Bengali, “The pictures you see in front, everybody remembers them and praises them. But nobody wants to know the people who work behind the scenes, nor talk about them. That is the nature of the world.”

A new study has shown that obesity is a major cause of many of the ailments that afflict cats and dogs which millions of Americans keep as house pets. “There are as many couch potatoes among them as among their masters and mistresses,” observed one vet. Oh the evils of plenty. No one who comes to America for the first time can fail to notice how many fat people there are on the street, in the stores or eating away in restaurants as if there were no tomorrow.

But obesity in America can be left for another day. This is about animals.

Pets can be big time expense in this country. The Animal Medical Centre in New York’s upper east side has 85 vets on its staff, several of whom are specialists. They do everything: from dialysis to organ transplants to, I presume, cosmetic surgery. Until the 1980s, all vets were simple GPs and the most sophisticated procedure they performed was neutering. No longer.

Animal medical care is now almost as sophisticated as its human equivalent. According to Burkhard Bilger, writing in the New Yorker, the American Veterinary Medical Association has more than 7,000 specialists in 39 fields, including cardiology, radiology, ophthalmology and oncology. The Animal Medical Centre’s kidney unit was set up at a cost of a quarter million dollars. Some clients have chartered planes to bring in their pets and stayed in expensive area hotels while they undergo treatment.

The Centre which is housed in an eight-storey building overlooking the East River, takes in around 65,000 animal patients every year and can provide even dental and dermatological treatment. Like a hospital for people, it has its surgery, emergency and recovery wards and in order to ensure the continued supply of blood needed for transfusions, it keeps 13 donor greyhounds and 26 donor cats. Some of the cats were inherited from an old woman who kept 70 of them in her apartment. There are also three donor ferrets called Larry, Mo and Curly.

New Yorkers, writes Bilger, keep a weird variety of exotic animals, though not always do they know how they are to be taken care of. The Animal Medical Centre has a separate unit to provide care for exotic animals and on a recent day, it treated a ferret with a hair ball, an anorexic bearded dragon, a pigeon with a fracture, a guinea pig that required a $5,000 worth operation on a urethral stone and a humming bird with a broken wing. Also being taken care of were a duck which had swallowed a metallic object and a corn snake with a clutch of eggs stuck in her birth canal.

According to the article, between 1980 and 2001, the number of dogs and cats in the United States grew from 98 million to 139 million. The American Animal Hospital Association says 63 per cent of pet owners say ‘I love you’ to their animals every day and 83 per cent call themselves their pet’s mom or dad. Funnily enough, the director of the Animal Medical Centre bears the name Guy Pidgeon, which his pigeon patients must find reassuring.

The average American vet makes around $60,000 a year, $100,000 less than the average physician who treats people. Nearly 400,000 pets are covered here by health insurance policies. Malpractice suits that have blighted the human side of the medical profession are also spreading to the animal care kingdom now. They will only result in sending up the cost of animal medical care.

Americans now spend $13 billion a year on veterinary care and if the cost of pet food and other supplies is added to that figure, the total comes to $47 billion. What could be more illustrative of the economically uneven world we live in, when you compare this with Pakistan’s total external debt. Is it any wonder then that the Cancun conference collapsed!

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Last time someone counted, there were 2,100 certified, dyed in the wool clichés in the English language, dyed in the wool, I should add, being one of them. Clichés are like the United Nations. One can’t live with it and one can’t live without it. There have been scores of definition of what a cliché is, but none better than that of George Orwell. The moment you suspect a word or a phrase is a cliché, it is.

Clichés are like the weather which, said Mark Twain, everyone complains about but nobody does a thing about. The moment you feel you are going to utter or write a cliché you should drop it like a hot potato .Which I confess is a cliché too, but one I like, maybe because I like potatoes. Even if the cliché were to disappear from the face of the earth (another cliché that), it will remain alive and well (yes that too) in Pakistan and India. In fact, I do not know what we would do without this hardy favourite – which is yet one more cliché. In an ideal world there would be no clichés and everyone would speak fresh, clean, crisp and simple prose without having to rely on dead and half-dead expressions that have ceased to have any meaning. But since we do not live in an ideal world and are never likely to, the cliché lives and comes to our rescue as and when summoned.

We use clichés because of intellectual laziness. The great convenience of a cliché is that it is prefabricated and for every situation, there is one. You just have to reach out, grab it and tuck it in. But then the advocates of good prose say a cliché should be avoided like the plague, which is as good a cliché as any. So where does one go from here, which, once again is a cliché in good standing. The question really is: is there life without cliché? Obviously, we can never be entirely rid of this great tool. What we can do is perhaps break it into three categories: clichés that are well, truly and certifiably dead, clichés that are the living dead and clichés that still have some life in them. The last category can be used, but like salt, not in excess.

Here are some dead ones which we should bury with full honours, a military band in attendance, offer them a happy and eternal stay in Fowlerland and pray that they remain in their graves and not come to haunt us when we put pen to paper or fingers on the keyboard. So observe a minute’s silence as the dead come marching in. Here they are: Achilles heel (should have died with the Trojans); airing dirty laundry or washing dirty linen in public (leave washing to your washerman); to pale in comparison (it’s not only pale, it’s actually dead); all that glitters is not gold (may have made sense before electroplating, but not today); all’s fair in love and war (not only of questionable wisdom but outdated); an apple a day keeps the doctor away (whoever invented it was either working for apple farmers or had never seen or eaten an apple); dense as a London fog (outdated since London has no more fog than Lahore has clean air); crack of dawn (just dawn would do); axe to grind (as outdated as going out every morning to chop some wood for the day’s cooking); back to square one (this is as bad as going round in circles or back to the drawing board, unless of course you are an engineer); be in the same boat (not unless you are actually in a boat); bend over backwards (only if you work in a circus); and hope against hope (then why hope at all?). This, mind you, is just a smattering of stiffs from a vast necropolis. Let them all rest in peace.

Category two is made of the living dead. Some of these zombies are: ill-fated idea (a bad idea would say it just as well); talk the talk and walk the walk (apart from being ugly sounding, it reminds you of those clowns in circus who walk on twenty-foot high crutches and don’t fall, much to the children’s disappointment); it takes two to tango (nobody dances the tango any longer; it is about as out of date as the Twist); jump on the bandwagon (avoid all jumps unless you want to crack a tendon. Also avoid jump ship, jump in with both feet – ask yourself if one can jump with one foot – and jump the gun); tip of the iceberg (not unless you are living in the North Pole); keep your powder dry (made sense during the Napoleonic wars but not today); kick the bucket (unless you want the sorest big toe in town and, remember, in the same category fall such darlings as kick your feet up); keep your cards close to your chest (only permitted if you are actually playing bridge and do not have a bad conscience about taking a peek at the opposition’s king before finessing it); and like a bull in a china shop (think of the china and the storeowner before you use it).

The last category is made up of those who are still breathing (that ambulance should, therefore, be sent back): running like a chicken with its head cut off (I am too lily-livered to cut off a chicken’s head but have always wondered if a chicken in that state would actually run and if so, how fast and how far); like there is no tomorrow (reminds you of Shahid Afridi batting in a one-dayer at Sharjah); looking at the world through rose-coloured glasses (being partial to lenses tinted rose, I don’t mind this one); lower than a snake’s belly (while I have a horror of those creepy, crawly things, I like the comparison); by the skin of one’s teeth (not a bad one though it makes you shiver as it reminds you of the dentist’s chair); money doesn’t grow on trees (except for Pakistan’s forest thieves); the more things change the more they stay the same (ok, as long as it is not said in French to impress others); one night stand (one can dream, can’t one?); put one’s money where one’s mouth is (because that is one thing not done in Pakistan); a rolling stone gathers no moss (unless his name is Mick Jagger in which case he not only gathers all the moss he wants but all the money he wants and every pretty girl in town); there are no free lunches (except this raises the question: what else do you think those now in the catbird seat in Islamabad are gorging themselves on?); and waiting for your ship to come in (unless the name of the ship is ‘Tasman Spirit’).

One cliché on which this cliché-ridden column should end is: when God gives you lemons, make lemonade.

Some really strange things have happened out here. I am sure by the time this appears in print, the Embassy of Pakistan in Washington, manned by our most experienced diplomat, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, will have either explained or amended what surely is going to be called a mistake, though in terms of size, nothing equals it except the Titanic.

An invitation issued by the Ambassador of Pakistan to the community dinner in honour of President Pervez Musharraf at the New York Hilton on 6th Avenue at 6.30 pm on September 21 described him as ‘the President of the Dominion of Pakistan’. It made me sit up. Then I rubbed my eyes and read it again — it had arrived by e-mail, though to several hundred others it must have gone by mail. I picked up my copy of the Legal Framework Order but nowhere did it say we were now a Dominion and no longer the Islamic Republic that everybody thought we were. While Gen. Pervez Musharraf has been accused of many things, nobody, not even Qazi Hussain Ahmed, has said that he had abolished the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and established a Dominion. Even Mr Sharifuddin Pirzada hadn’t thought of this one.

Was it that our distinguished ambassador, who has been here, there and everywhere, was feeling nostalgic for those long lost days of early Pakistan when we were a Dominion and faithful subjects of the Most Gracious Queen of England? Our air force used to be not the Pakistan Air Force but the Royal Pakistan Air Force and our President’s arm, the Artillery, was the Royal Pakistan Artillery. The Pakistan Navy was the Royal Pakistan Navy and where the eagle now perches, there used to be the royal Britannic crown itself. The crescent and star that signify an army major’s rank were once a crown.

Or was it that in printing the invitation — this being one of the oldest of our missions out of which nothing has been thrown away — the embassy had relied on a 1948 invitation sent out by our first ambassador to Washington, M. A. H. Isphahani? Who knows. However, no blame should attach to Ambassador Qazi. He is a diplomat not a printer. Does he have to read everything that goes out in his name? No! He has far more important things to do than read invitation cards, even if they relate to the President of Pakistan.

If the hoopla this most amazing invitation is going to cause — or has caused by the time this column appears — results in the beheading of a Third Secretary, that would be sad though not unexpected. Knowing what I know of the system that operates in the erstwhile Dominion of Pakistan, it is exactly a Third Secretary who one fine morning would find to his surprise that his neck has been wrung. The rule is: kick the weakest kid in the class. Gone are the days when the commander in charge of a botched assault was made to carry the can. The rule now is: commanders rule, subalterns perish.

Or could the Washington embassy take the position that the word Dominion was a printing error? After all, this won’t be the first time a printing error would have occurred, though how the words ‘Islamic Republic’ got printed as ‘Dominion’ would remain a mystery. If it turns out to be a ‘printing error’, the only thing I can compare it with is this young man who used to pass through a certain street every day and look longingly at a dark eyed, long-haired beauty who would stand on her balcony and flutter her eyelashes at him. One day, having decided to pine no more, he ran up the stairs that led to the elusive beauty’s perch. The moment she realised what had happened, she began to scream. Within minutes every resident of the street came rushing in to rescue the maiden in distress. One of them, a crafty old geezer, held the crowd back and said, “Before we decide what to do with this audacious young man, let’s ask him for an explanation.” “OK, explain,” the old bird demanded. “I fell down,” the young man replied. “And pray how did you fall down from the street below to the first storey?” the wise bird asked. “Because I don’t know my way around.”

Long Live the Dominion of Pakistan.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Now that I think of it, I first got to know Bashir Riaz, who has just published an autobiographical and episodic account of his life with the Bhuttos, through Zulfikar Ali Bhutto himself. Somewhere in the spring of 1972, he handed me a letter Bashir Riaz had written to him from London, saying I should have a word with Mr Majid Nizami next time we were in Lahore. So next time we were there, I called on Mr Nizami and said that Mr Bhutto would appreciate it greatly were Nawai waqt to settle what was owed to Bashir Riaz. Isn’t it ironic that half our working life as journalists should be spent either chasing after money we are owed or money we think we should be making. Anyone seeking financial comfort should obviously be doing something else.

In a culture where the ability to change sides, drop old friends and pick up new ones, is the key to success, Bashir Riaz has remained consistent in his loyalty to the Bhuttos since that distant day in December 1965 when he wrote a letter from England to ZAB, then foreign minister, about an anti-Pakistan article he had replied to in an Indian publication called Milap. ZAB wrote back, “It gives me a very good feeling to know that the interests of Pakistan abroad are being guarded so zealously by patriotic citizens of Pakistan like yourself.” Ah, ZAB. He always answered letters because he believed that if someone had taken the trouble to write to him, he should take the trouble of writing back. Such courtesies have disappeared but that is a lament for another day.

Bashir Riaz remained in contact with ZAB through the early and difficult years after he left the Ayub government and began testing the waters in Pakistan and abroad with a view to forming a new political party. It was on people like Bashir Riaz that ZAB relied. He had caught the fancy of the young and the poor and that remained his constituency, as it remains the constituency of his daughter, many years and so many ups and downs later. It is to Bashir Riaz’s credit that he did not seek, nor was he rewarded for, being among the first people to have thrown in his lot with ZAB. It is a strange aspect of history that those who deserve most are the very ones who are left by the wayside when politicians walk form the wilderness of opposition to the halls of government.

In August 1977, narrates Benazir Bhutto in her autobiography, Bashir Riaz wrote to Begum Nusrat Bhutto to ask her husband to leave the country as he had been told by a confidant of Ziaul Haq, “Just forget Bhutto. He will never come back to power. Zia has decided that he is going to hang Bhutto for a murder he will be found responsible for.” The warning which turned out to be tragically accurate was ignored. It is a pity that those who came to occupy close positions of trust around ZAB were the very men who later facilitated his executioners. One such was Saeed Ahmed Khan about whom Bashir Riaz writes, “What a great tragedy it is that a man who strutted around for five years as Bhutto’s chief of security, testified against him in the Lahore High Court some months later. He stated that he was helpless and was no more than a tool of his master. And so was Masood Mahmood who also became a witness against Bhutto in the murder case. These fortune hunters saw to it that Bhutto remained surrounded by the ‘yes minister’ crowd.”

After ZAB’s fall, London became the centre of the anti-Zia movement. The late Inam Aziz’s firecracker of an Urdu daily Millat led the fight against military rule. Also active was Habibur Rehman with his weekly Azad. I remember one of his editorials on Zia captioned “Crush the head of this hangman”, for which he may still be paying a price. Bashir Riaz was now an inseparable friend and adviser to Murtaza and Shahnawaz who lived in Stanhope Gardens in South Kensington where I also visited them a few times. Bashir Riaz had also started bringing out Musawat from London. However, when the brothers went to Kabul, he did not go with them, though he visited them there and accompanied Murtaza to Delhi where they were received by Mrs Indira Gandhi who had lobbied various heads of state and government to save ZAB’s life. Bashir Riaz was also instrumental in the publication of ZAB’s book If I am assassinated. Earlier a letter ZAB had written to Murtaza from his death cell included this moving line, “The important thing is that time will pass; the most important thing is that I must pass through it with honour. Whatever the end, it must be faced bravely.”

When the imprisoned Benazir was finally allowed by Zia to travel to London for a long-neglected ear operation, she found emotional sustenance among those such as Bashir Riaz. When she returned to Pakistan with her brother Shahnawaz’s body, he was with her. When she made her triumphant return to Lahore, among those who flew back with her was the old faithful. As prime minister she put Bashir Riaz in charge of her press relations with the foreign media, a position of trust and proximity that soon led to intrigue against him. It was then that men like Happy Minwala (where is he?) infiltrated the prime minister’s circle. Bashir Riaz recalls that even Zia’s trusted information supremo General Mujibur Rehman came to see her and with a straight face referred to ZAB as “ shaheed”, an appellation at which Benazir must have flinched, coming as it did from one of the closest aides to Bhutto’s executioner. Sick of intrigue, Bashir Riaz at this stage began to feel that the dignified thing for him would be to return to London, and so he did. Benazir was sorry to see him leave but made no attempt to stop him.

When her government fell, Bashir Riaz was among those who were still there for her. In her second term, he remained around but did not take nor was given a formal position. And today when she lives in exile, the man she trusts most is Bashir Riaz. In Iqbal’s words, “ Wafardari ba-shart-e- istwari asl eemaan hai”. He has no regrets and he has no complaints. Benazir Bhutto of 2003 is a much chastened person and has no illusions as to who her friends are and who they are not. One person she can trust and does trust is Bashir Riaz whose other name could well be Always There.

It has taken me some time to realise that more worrying about Pakistan is done when you are not living there than when you are living there. Most conversations with your fellow countrymen abroad begin on a sombre note. ‘What news from home?’ you ask, or you are asked. ‘Not good, not good at all,’ you answer or you are answered. I have now lived outside Pakistan, physically at least, for almost thirty years and I do not remember ever getting into or overhearing a conversation between two or more Pakistanis that did not sound like the opening address at an undertakers’ convention.

Is it that we worry overly? Are our expectations of our country higher than those of others about their countries? In Vienna I worked for nearly ten years with a lot of Arabs, Latin Americans and Africans and it was rarely that I found them speak of ‘back home’ in tones other than cheerful and upbeat. So what is wrong with us? Or is it something fundamentally and irreparably wrong with our country? Are we too critical? Are we too morose? Is our outlook on life a particularly pessimistic one? Lunch at the restaurant of choice to the first three correct answers.

Washington has a larger presence of South Asia experts than any other Western capital, including, one would suggest, London. In a given year, more serious discussions on what ails Pakistan and Pakistanis are held here than anywhere else, including Pakistan. However, I do not remember walking out of any in the last many years feeling that God was in His heaven and all was right with the world. Whatever the theme, it is always a downer.

So perhaps the roundtable held this week at Brookings, organised by the indefatigable Dr Nisar Chaudhry and his Pakistan-America League wasn’t that different. Dr Chaudhry is a dentist by profession and though I have never sat for him, if he is half as good a dentist as he is an organiser of events, I would gladly trust him with my molars. The theme of the discussion was: the future of sustainable democracy in Pakistan. On the panel, Dr Chaudhry had collared former US ambassador to Pakistan William Milam, Ambassador Teresita Schaffer of CSIS and Ms Michelle Sasson from the State Department’s South Asia bureau (she was number two at the US embassy in Islamabad). For moderator he had lassoed in Stephen Cohen who has just returned from Pakistan and is already missing Lahore.

Milam, who served in Pakistan from 1998 to 2001, opened the innings, so to speak, and made the most telling observations. He said for democracy to be sustainable, one first had to have democracy; but what Pakistan had today was a ‘military-hybrid’ government. There was a partnership with elected civilians but they were not the ‘superior partner’. The prime minister had been selected by the president and it was clear that he would serve at his pleasure.

As if the humidity of Washington were not enough to make life miserable, Milam reminded those who had forgotten that the General’s constitutional amendments were ‘dubious’. He also said that politicians were anathema to the military, but put it in perspective by pointing out that this had been so since the 1950s. The military had a fundamental distrust of civilians. The civilians, of course, had done much (or not done much) to earn that and their track record when in power was not a very happy one. And then there was military spending and the neglect of the social sector. The military, the ambassador who sports a very Pakistani moustache said, had a history of failures and seemed not to have learnt from the past. To that I wanted to say: welcome to the club.

As I walked out of Brookings which is just off Dupont Circle, the humidity hit me like a sledgehammer. I suppose it was not my day. Next time I will give Ambassador Milam a miss or at least not hear him talk about Pakistan. We need some good news. Maybe I will phone Shaukat Aziz because he always has some. He ups the price of gasoline or cooking oil or sugar but the smile never leaves his face. Unlike Milam he has some good news for us. But how do I know I won’t get his PA instead of him when I call?

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

The Lahore journalist Sohail Warriach is among those who have investigated the feudal scene in Pakistan and found that no matter what system is in force or who the ruler of the day is, the feudals are well and truly and represented in both national and provincial assemblies.

If Gen Pervez Musharraf’s graduation requirement for those running for parliament was intended to keep out the usual suspects, it ended up keeping out the devils we at least knew so well, while bringing on board their English-medium offspring. The new generation of old feudals is much better armed to keep the status quo intact than the one it replaced. Assuming the General’s intentions were good, by now he must know that his quarry managed to outsmart him. And in case he wanted the same old wine in newer bottles, then I congratulate him on his brilliant success. He can have another one for the road. On his last visit to Washington, information minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said he was the only ghareeb in parliament. One can only pray that everyone becomes impoverished like him because then at least everyone will have a Lal Haveli to live in and a farm in the country to spend weekends at. Admittedly, the Sheikh is not a feudal and no particular favourite of the feudals since he keeps taking potshots at them.

Leaving the Sheikh for another day, I would like to turn to a rather remarkable man and a driven eccentric who like the famous knight of La Mancha has been denouncing feudals for many years. Wisely, he does it from a safe distance because he obviously knows that these gents have their goon squads on call and those boys brook no nonsense. The man fights the feudals through writing, something that is less than likely to meet success since the written word is neither here nor there in Pakistan. Those who rule the land don’t read books and, as a matter of fact, have a pretty low opinion of those who write and read them.

Mohammed Naim Ullah does not live in Pakistan. He lives in London and has for thirty if not forty years. He is an engineer by training and there is just one obsession he has in life. He wants feudalism to end in Pakistan. While one can only wish him luck, we all know that feudalism is as likely to end in our country as Christmas coming twice a year. Only the other day, the prime minister of Pakistan, His Heaviness himself, regaled the nation with the happy news that his government had no plans whatever to introduce land reform. Some people say the only thing Mr Jamali’s government can do is to make it possible for him to live in that nice house on the hill in Islamabad. What can one say to the prime minister except advise him that since he won’t get on his exercise machine, he should at least hit the prayer mat and the Lord God may bless him with seven lean years.

Naim Ullah says he bid goodbye to engineering soon after returning to Pakistan from Switzerland in 1958. His Swiss degree he appears to have rolled up and put away. He says he became convinced that all Pakistan’s ills lay in feudalism and unless the country was rid of it, there could be no economic or social progress. More than forty years later he is still at it. Feudalism is alive and well and flourishing but Naim Ullah has not given up though he is no spring chicken any more, having been born in Delhi in 1931. However, he remains young at heart and even angrier than he was in his youth.

He decided to write a book on Pakistani feudalism and did so in English but it made no impact and he could find no publisher willing to bring it out. Finally, Dr Mubashar Hasan, under whom Naim Ullah had studied at the Engineering College, Lahore in 1948, advised him to translate the book into Urdu so that more people could read it, advice that he followed. While it is unlikely his book, which has the rather long name Pakistan jagirdari zamindari ke shikanjay mein will do the trick, both the effort and the passion that Naim Ullah brings to it are commendable. We need men and women like him.

Naim Ullah argues that Pakistan is an agricultural country with more than 75 percent of the population made up of illiterate peasants working under the most deplorable conditions as tenants and sharecroppers for their feudal masters. “Our peasants are forced to lead the life of serfs. After filling their belly they have no purchasing power left to buy industrial goods or to pay for services of any kind.” He believes that feudalism and democracy cannot coexist. He cites Japan as an example where land was distributed to its actual tillers in 1945 and feudalism abolished. He wants Pakistan to place a maximum individual holding of 12.5 acres of irrigated land. Well, he can go on dreaming because Pakistan is no Japan and our general is no MacArthur who abolished feudalism in that country.

Naim Ullah is of the view that the establishment of Pakistan was aimed at protecting the interests of the landed classes, a thesis that is neither new nor unchallenged. He correctly points out three influential religious figures – Maudoodi, Bashiruddin Mahmood and Pervez – unjustifiably employed Islam to justify feudalism. Pakistan’s courts have also followed the same line, barring the odd judge such as Dr Naseem Hasan Shah who expressed a dissenting opinion. Punjab, it is clear, is the main beneficiary of the institution of feudalism, since 68 percent of Pakistan’s cultivated land lies in this province. Seventy-four percent of Punjab’s cultivated land is irrigated. The author believes that the Islamists’ demand that interest be declared inadmissible is actually aimed at serving the feudal interest because if the interest-based system is weakened or abolished altogether, its beneficiaries would only be those with large landholdings.

Naim Ullah points out that after independence, the feudals began to demand “Islamic” laws, but the three key thinkers he has cited declared the rotten and outdated feudal system of jagirdari and zamindari to be truly Islamic. In 1989, the highest court in Pakistan placed the stamp of permanence on feudalism. Naim Ullah wants Gen. Pervez Musharraf to put the feudal system to death. All one can say is that he better get used to another major disappointment. If he prefers to dream, then dream on.

None of Pakistan’s rulers comes off smelling very nice from Naim Ullah’s account. The Ayub and Bhutto land reforms are shown to have been hollow and ineffective, if not fraudulent. The only individuals who emerge with honour are M Masud Khaddarposh aka Masood “Bhagwan” of the famous Hari Report, Mian Iftikharuddin, Mian Mumtaz Muhammad Khan Daultana, Khan Abdul Qayoom Khan, Zahid Hasan and Haider Bux Jatoi. According to the author, they all made honest and sincere attempts to demolish the feudal system without caring for their personal interest or popularity. Although they failed, they have earned a place of respect in history. Meanwhile, feudalism lives, fifty-six years after the Quaid-e-Azam declared it incompatible with human dignity.

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