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Several years ago when Pakistan won a seat in the Security Council after a hard-fought election, my friend Abdul Qadeer, professor of urban planning at the University of Kingston in Canada, said, “We don’t need a seat on the Security Council: we need more public toilets in Lahore.” Obviously no one is going to listen to such advice and he will be lucky if on his next visit home he is not taken for a drive in a jeep with no plates.

Those have lived in Lahore, or would like to live in Lahore, are always thinking of it and comparing the city that was with the city that is and the city that will be. Last October, in the two weeks I was there, I never saw a blue sky. It was always a sickly colour, hardly a sight to send the spirit soaring. “Come back when the rains arrive and you will see blue,” a friend said.

From an unexpected quarter now I have received four short essays on Lahore that should make us sit up. I say unexpected because I only know Nadeem ul Haque as an economist who currently serves the IMF as its resident representative in Cairo. Cairo may give home to his body, but his heart without doubt is in Lahore

From this point on, it is Nadeem ul Haque.

“Have you seen any tower cranes in Lahore?” he asks. No one has. No other reasonable sized city is without them, so it is strange that a city with a population of over five million has none. Why are there no tall buildings in Lahore? WAPDA house made in 1966 remains the tallest. Why? Because the emphasis in Lahore has been on housing colonies based on estates for the rich. The elite wishes to keep the commercial areas and housing for the poor out of sight and out of mind. In Model Town and Gulberg, where the town expanded after independence, the regulators were concerned with preserving their manors or kothis. For years, no commercial construction was allowed on Ferozepur Road and Gulberg’s Main Boulevard. Those who regulate these things have their own fish to fry. Commercialisation fee on land that may have been zoned as commercial has been steep in the past, making already expensive commercial construction even more expensive. It has recently been reduced but why is it collected at all? To build amenities, one is told. But aren’t property taxes levied just for that? Kothiwalas do not wish to see much commercial construction, and that is the constituency of the regulator who invariably obliges them.

The planners believe that the city is for the convenience of the kothiwalas. The residential convenience of the kothiwalas, with a nod to their clubs and social haunts, is all that city planners cater for. It is not surprising that what has been allowed to develop with rapidity are golf courses and highways for the kothis. The GOR in Lahore typifies it best. It boasts two social clubs; while efforts to build a hotel or a school in the heart of the estate have been blocked on the ground that it is a residential area. At the same time, the GOR boasts a four acre mansion for the chief justice of the Lahore high court that has remained vacant for most of our history. It is maintained at the taxpayer’s expense only for the occasional weddings of the offspring of their lordships.

The “gentry of Lahore” through the regulators of LDA and LMC has had it ruled that no building can go over four stories initially. “So your 25 percent of market value commercialisation fee will obtain permission for only a four-storey construction. Should you wish to go higher, you will have to pay a per floor ‘penalty’ and since it is charged at a flat rate, it penalises cheaper land. The maximum height is 14 floors, granted after paying a 25 percent commercialisation fee and 10 times the per floor penalty. Essentially, that means that you have to pay at least twice the value of the land should you wish to construct a 14-floor building” according to Nadeem ul Haque.

He points out that the Punjab Club and the Sindh Club, which in 1947 had no non-white members, were not declared evacuee properties but gifted to the elite who promptly became members. The land transferred to them at a hugely subsidised rate constituted a transfer from the poor taxpayers of Pakistan to the kothiwala elite. These clubs are commercial ventures and should be treated as such. Their land should be properly priced and they should be taxed at market rates so that the rich pay a fair price for their entertainment.

There is more. Regulators not only stifle construction through cumbersome and expensive procedures, they also destroy the real estate rental market through rent control. Every major city in the world has eliminated rent control, but not Lahore. It has to go if the construction sector is to be revitalised. With market rents, pension funds, insurance companies and other financing companies will step forward to finance and hold real estate development. It is not surprising then that with so many controls and regulations you do not see tower cranes in Lahore.

The regulators of Lahore and their masters the gentry of the kothis have ruled that Lahore will remain provincial. We will have no high rises, no serious blocks of flats, no commercial complexes! Consequently no tower cranes!

That, Nadeem ul Haque says, is a pity because we are a poor country and need our economic sectors to grow rapidly, construction being one of the most vital. The poor have had to struggle for space, he says. In Canal Park, Jail Road and several areas, the poor have had to fight for small kiosks. Carpenters, weavers, tailors and all manner of artisans set up informal shops to earn a living. For years they continue to live under threat of expulsion. Every now and again the regulators push them out but they have nowhere to go. They set up a stall elsewhere. The regulatory mindset has to change, he argues, if Lahore is to be a premiere Asian city. To make room for thriving commerce, estates have given way elsewhere to consolidated mixed-use urban space. Sleepy estates or kothis should be pushed further out into the suburbia. The emphasis must not remain on “ kothis for the rich” but “commercial development for the poor”.

Will it happen? Yes, but in a week of Sundays.

Something is going on — has gone on for some time — between New Delhi and Islamabad involving Kashmir. The United States denies that it has anything to do with it. Employing a string of the usual clichés, the only thing it confesses to is wishing both countries well and hoping they can come to terms and settle their differences bilaterally and in a peaceful manner. How many times have we heard that? The question is has the United States been as out of it as it would have us believe? Let’s see.

Colin Powell may have inadvertently given us a peep behind the scenes when he said in a recent interview — he grants on average three to four a day which should worry his doctors — that the US had been working on India and Pakistan for the last two years. However, everyone here (including Charlie’s aunt) emphasises that this in no way takes away the credit for the Islamabad Accord from General Musharraf and Prime Minister Vajpayee. A Washington Post columnist has practically anointed the two leaders as potential Nobel Peace Prize winners, which must send a shiver down the spine of those who remember the Nobel awarded to Yasser Arafat and Menachim Begin. Will the same kind of peace be brought to Kashmir as has come to Palestine?

There can be no question now that something has been going on behind the scenes. The rapidity with which the two countries have announced and implemented what they call confidence building measures is without precedent. What in the past had taken years has taken days this time. Indian external affairs minister Yashwant Sinha told a meeting at the Woodrow Wilson Centre that the ceasefire in Kashmir was comprehensive and never before had such a ceasefire taken effect. It not only was being observed along the Line of Control in Kashmir but was effectively in place along the Pakistan border with Jammu, as well as in the Siachin Glacier which would be the first time those frozen heights have been spared the sound of gunfire.

Pakistan has practically jettisoned the UN Security Council resolutions calling for a plebiscite in Kashmir through a unilateral announcement by President Musharraf, a development that took the whole world by surprise. It used to be said that Pakistan was a party to the Kashmir dispute by virtue of those resolutions. They were the bedrock on which Pakistan’s case rested. It can, therefore, be argued that Pakistan stands to lose its locus standi in Kashmir if the Security Council resolutions are to be no longer operative. Why has Pakistan moved away from those resolutions? Was it asked to make this ‘gesture’ by those who are brokering the deal, more and more of whose features will surface in the coming months?

The Hurriyet stands divided, and not without help from Pakistan, as everyone in the Valley believes. I have spoken to two Kashmiris who have just returned from Srinagar and both of them confirm this. One faction is talking to India, the other is sulking in Srinagar. On Thursday, it was the Hurriyet faction led by Maulanas Abbas Ansari that stressed, according to the ‘agreed synopsis’ issued after the meeting with L K Advani that ‘all forms of violence at all levels should end’. In effect, the Kashmir issue has been reduced to an issue of violence. End the violence and there will be no issue, is the message. This has remained the Indian position to which part of the Kashmiri leadership has now agreed. The other faction led by Syed Ali Gillani has denounced the accord, as has the firebrand leader Yasin Malik.

On December 30 the Pioneer newspaper in New Delhi carried an article — it went unnoticed or uncommented on in Pakistan — by one Ms Jain (obviously a pen name) which said that “New Delhi is abuzz with inspired leaks of secret talks to settle the Indo-Pakistani border by wholly incorporating Machel, Keran and Gurez” into Azad Kashmir. These areas can broadly be called the Kishen Ganga Valley. The “purported plan envisages self-rule in the Kashmir Valley; autonomous hill councils for Poonch, Rajouri and Doda districts; Union Territory status for Ladakh; the Hindu-dominated Jammu, Kathua and Udhampur districts and overall sovereignty of Jammu & Kashmir to remain with India,” while Azad Kashmir would have “an autonomous government with sovereignty vested with Islamabad. The Line of Control will reportedly be demilitarised once the border is thus redrawn, and India will also reduce troops deployment on the Siachen glacier.”

The Pioneer report has the ominous ring of truth. Perhaps the cliché about history repeating itself has come true one more time. Are the Kashmiris going to be sold down the river? Again?

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Anyone who knew Syed Abid Ali, who died so suddenly in Islamabad at the turn of the new year, would agree that he could only be described as a prince among men. He was a man with a heart of gold and shoulders strong enough to take on any burden if it could be of some benefit to a friend. How he managed to do that never ceased to amaze me, because the number of his friends was legion. For each of them, he had the same wonderful and warm smile, the same open-armed and big-hearted hospitality, the same affection, the same concern.

There are some whom God sends to this world with an unlimited capacity to love. He also gives them the ability and the strength not to burden others with their own troubles. In all the years I knew Syed Abid Ali, I do not remember even once hear him complain about anyone or anything. All one always saw on his face was a sun-like smile and optimism beyond measure. His wit, his good humour, his sense of fun were infectious. I am not surprised that he maintained a life-long friendship with Raja Tajammul Hussain, who shares many of Syed Abid Ali’s qualities and his benevolent attitude towards life and people.

How long had I known Syed Abid Ali? When did I first meet him? Who brought us together? I really have no idea because he was the sort of man about whom you could say, “I have always known him.” It is possible that we first met in Karachi in the mid-1960s during my brief stint with the old Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, when he was in tourism.

He used to hang out at the Central Hotel which was also the daytime and evening headquarters of Sadequain to whom no one was closer in the whole wide world than Syed Abid Ali and his lovely and wonderful wife Nazi, whom Sadequain had declared his one and only sister. One day, word went round that Safdar Mir “Zeno” (whom Sara Suleri Goodyear has dismissed in her recent book as “a columnist”) had arrived in Karachi. Since he left Lahore rarely, his arrival in Karachi was an event for his friends. He was even perhaps staying with Syed Abid Ali. We gathered in the evening at the great watering hole of Central Hotel and since the bar was overflowing with acolytes of the “red fairy in her black dog coach”, we took a table in the courtyard which was equally crowded.

There were just the three of us with Syed Abid Ali wearing a perfectly starched, long white muslin kurta – a loud declaration of Punjabiyat in the heart of pre-MQM Karachi. We were happily engaged in conversation, mostly about Lahore and what was happening there, when suddenly, a man at the next table said something to Safdar Mir that was not only out of the blue but absolutely uncalled for. Safdar Mir, never to take one on the chin, and a boxer in his youth (‘Phir raha hai shehr mein Safdar khula,’ Ahmed Mushtaq had once written) rose slowly from his chair and was about to land one on the intruder’s jaw, when like a bolt of lightening Syed Abid Ali Shah, the most peaceful of men, fell on the man. The fight was brief but it was straight out of a Marx Brothers movie. Alas, the victim was Syed Abid Ali’s immaculate mulmul ka kurta, torn from one end to the other. Moral: if you must get into a fight, on no account should you be in a muslin kurta.

The walls of Syed Abid Ali’s home were plastered with Sadequain’s work: sketches, calligraphy, doodles, his famous quatrains, what have you. If there was one man in this world who could talk Sadequain in or out of anything, it was Syed Abid Ali, and more than that his “sister” Nazi. They could do no wrong and what they said, went. Those who knew Sadequain would also know what a hard man to persuade into anything he was.

And few people were closer to Faiz Ahmed Faiz than Syed Abid Ali. Faiz’s great elegy for Hussain and the martyrs of Karbala entitled ‘Marsiyya-e-Imam’ (Raat aayi hai Shabbir pai yalghar-e-bala hai) he once recited at Karbala Gamay Shah in Lahore where Syed Abid Ali had taken him during Muharram. It was awesome, he told me, hearing Faiz recite that powerful elegy for the Prince of Martyrs, Hussain. “You know people like Faiz, we Shias call them Sunni Shias,” he told me. I should also add that if there was one person who could crack a joke at Faiz’s expense and get away with it, without doubt it was Syed Abid Ali.

He had a game heart and where most would have taken to parhaizi khana, long walks and teetotalling, Syed Abid Ali chose to live life to the hilt. I have neither seen nor heard of anyone treating heart disease with the contempt it deserves as Syed Abid Ali. While it is true that in the end it got him, he never lost any sleep over it. Syed Abid Ali was irrepressible. Last November, he was rushed to hospital where his heart stopped and it was only the heroic efforts of a doctor that brought him back to life. He wrote about it in the Daily Times on 28 December. What follows is vintage Syed Abid Ali. No one else could have written about a near-death experience with such exuberance.

Syed Abid Ali writes, “A personal note (with profound apologies): I was rushed to Islamabad’s PIMS Hospital with a serious heart condition in the small hours of the morning some four weeks ago. I am told that as I tried to stand up from the wheelchair to lie down on the bed in the CCU, I went limp and fell down on the floor where ostensibly I ‘kicked the bucket’, following a cardiac arrest. What happened afterwards, I have managed to piece together from the professional exchanges among the doctors and the prying questioning of my wife and son. It seems there had been a slight confusion of identity on the part of the venerable angel of death and the Almighty, in His merciful munificence, put it right by sending another young angel clad in a white coat in the form of Dr Tahir. When he failed to revive me by other means, he gave me six electric shocks on the chest, one after another. It seems that the last one, given just under the heart did the trick and the old ticker started ticking away once again, feebly at first but satisfactorily level in good time.

“The process took an hour and a half, during which time I remember nothing but total oblivion. No peering down a tunnel with a bright light at the other end or flying like a lark in the skies. When my cardiologist, Dr Iqbal Saifullah, a soft spoken man with a healing touch, arrived later on in the morning, he told me I had just passed out, and that to be on the safe side, I would be kept in the hospital for another week or so. At the time of discharge, he advised me to take it easy for a while and to go back to my normal routine in about a month’s time. This is the reason for my absence from these pages for the last month or so.

“It would, perhaps, be presumptuous on my part to say that I have saved friends Munoo Bhai and Zafar Iqbal Mirza, for the time being, from writing emotional columns and friend Khalid Hasan from ‘mentioning me in dispatches’ with the same love, warmth and affection that he has shown over the years. But after all, what is an obituary between friends, and, if possible I would like to go through mine in my lifetime. I promise it would never be leaked out until it is actually published on the ‘proper occasion’. May I be allowed to improvise a couplet, with due apologies to Mirza Ghalib: ‘ Munoo-o-Meerza column tau likhen gay shayed: Mur gaya Abid-e-Ashufta nawa kahtay hein.’”

This piece of remembrance of a dear friend, it is appropriate, should end with a snatch of poetry from Iqbal:

Jo bada-kash thay puranay wo uthtay jatay hain:

Kahin is aab-baqaye dwam la saqi.

The old friends from the tavern have started leaving one by one;

Bring O bring from somewhere, cupbearer, the elixir of life everlasting.

For the last three weeks or so, it has been open season on Pakistan with one American newspaper after another denouncing its nuclear programme and the establishment that controls it as insecure, undependable and unsafe, motivated not so much by national self-interest as pecuniary or ideological considerations. I write this on Friday, 16 January and I would like to state for the record that to date I have not seen a single word printed in Pakistan’s defence from any of our diplomatic representatives or the well-heeled community “leaders” who dine with the President in Islamabad every December, promising him the moon.

It is not a campaign: it is an onslaught that is unrelenting in its ferocity. It just goes on and on. There is a saying in English: call a man a dog and hang him. I have never been reminded of it more than in the last few weeks. Those who follow the news columns of this newspaper would probably have seen several reports that have appeared in them, based on what has been appearing here day after day after day. It is a universally observed rule of journalism that once one newspaper has printed a certain story, no other newspaper will run it unless it can add on to it or give it a new angle. That rule has been flouted here with impunity because the same story has been appearing again and again, the only difference being perhaps the language, but not much of a difference there either.

The case against Pakistan is that its nuclear establishment contains rogue elements who have been hawking sensitive information and even equipment to such countries as Iran, Libya and North Korea. This has been done either with the connivance of the government of Pakistan or without its knowledge. So whether it is the first or the second, the government of Pakistan stands condemned. All stories have also said that in case jihadi elements were to take over the government or lay their hands on nuclear weapons, they would hand them over to Islamic terrorists. The prime target is Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan’s only folk hero. Someone once said, “You can say what you like about who you like in Pakistan and get away with it, but make sure it is not Dr Khan.” David Albright, who runs ISIS, a nuclear think tank here, and who is almost always being quoted by every print and media outlet, told me himself over a year ago that Dr Khan had been relieved of his position under pressure from Washington.

Some of the things that have been said about Pakistan and Dr Khan are so disgraceful that it is shocking that serious newspapers should put them in print. And yet they have done so repeatedly. Some of the charges have been so ridiculous as to be laughable, one being that the AQ Khan labs had printed a brochure advertising their wares, as if they were selling vacuum cleaners or an ointment that can make hair grow on a bald head. I have read language used against Pakistan that I do not expect to see in a serious newspaper. Jim Hoagland, one of Washington Post’s star columnists called on Pakistan to “cease its international criminality”. He went on to denounce Pakistan as part of a “quartet of infamy”. For that final kick in the pants, he held Pakistan responsible for terrorism against India.

There is no question that this is a well-planned, well-organised smear campaign against Pakistan. The question is why. I have heard several explanations but the one that has appealed to me best comes from Dr Manzur Ejaz, who writes for newspapers at home and here. He said the idea was to keep Pakistan under intense pressure so that its nuclear programme is effectively “cordoned off”. Once the US is done with its “war on terrorism, Pakistan’s number will come up.” This is not a scare scenario but something that could well happen. What Pakistan and its representatives need to do is to defend the country and its position vigorously and with conviction, both abroad and at home. A bland one-time denial by the Foreign Office spokesman in Islamabad, who appears to have become exceedingly fond of his own voice, is not enough. No, sir, as my friend Mickey Shafi would say, it is not enough.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

In my reform house,” Saadat Hasan Manto wrote in his later years, “I keep no combs, curlers or shampoos because I do not know how to apply make-up on human beings. If Agha Hashr was cross-eyed, I have no device that can straighten his crooked eye, nor can I make him shed flowers form his mouth in place of the four-letter words that were his forte … Every angel admitted to the facility I operate has been barbered thoroughly in style so that not a single hair is left standing on his head.”

Elsewhere he wrote that he pronounced a thousand curses on that society which after a man’s death laundered out his life and then hung it by a nail on the wall, declaring him “Of Blessed Memory.” Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of Manto’s death at the young age of 43 in Lahore. Will it be celebrated in the country that he chose as home and where he produced some of this greatest work and in whose earth he lies buried? I doubt it. The day will pass unnoticed, except for a meeting or two in Lahore.

One of Manto’s closest friends in his last years was the late Professor GM Asar, then teaching at Government College, Lahore. In January 1983 the late Muzaffar Ali Syed and some other friends and admirers of Manto decided to hold a session with Prof Asar to record his memories of the great man. The meeting held at Hamid and Qaisra Alvi’s home in Islamabad was attended by Syed and his wife Rashida Syed and the late writer Munir Ahmed Sheikh and his wife Nusrat Munir. Prof Asar’s reminiscences were recorded by Mrs Syed and circulated among those present to ensure their accuracy. Eleven years later, the transcript appeared in the journal Nairang-e-Khyal. Manto’s readers and fans would find Prof Asar’s memories, some of which have been challenged by the Manto family, fascinating and, in places, painful. Manto would have favoured their publication.

Manto’s last story, Prof Asar recalled, was “Kabootar kabootri” that he read at a small FC College student gathering three days before his death. He was on his way to college when his youngest son told him that Apa Iqbal, Manto’s sister, wanted to see him. When he went to the Manto home next door he found her crying. When he asked her what the matter was she replied “Why are you asking me, go in and see your brother?” Prof Asar went into Manto’s room and found him covered with a quilt. He called out his name but there was no reply, just a shudder in the heap. An ambulance was sent for that took Manto to Mayo Hospital. The doctor on duty felt for Manto’s pulse and said casually, “You have brought him to the wrong place. You should have taken him to the graveyard. He is dead.”

Prof Asar said that after Manto’s death he was asked to write something and he completed a piece captioned “Qatil kaun” (‘who’s the murderer’) but did not publish it. He said, “Manto’s marriage was a difficult one. Apa Iqbal (Manto’s sister) would give him a vitamin B-complex shot every day and every evening there would be an argument in the house with his wife saying, ‘Don’t you want me to be rid of this torture in my life?’” Three days after Manto’s death, Prof Asar recalled going to the Manto home and saying to his wife, “Bhabi, I have come to ask you for something.” When she wanted to know what, he replied, “There was a brass glass that he always drank out of. Please give it to me.” He was told that the three or four such glasses in the house had all been electroplated since, so she could not say which among those was the one he wanted. “And it was only three days after his death. I felt greatly pained … His private life was very bitter.” Asked if it was so because of his heavy drinking or his lack of a sense of responsibility, Prof Asar replied, “Both, both things.”

Prof Asar said Manto was sent to the mental hospital in Lahore against his will, and at his wife’s insistence. There he was given certain medicines which affected his mind. Manto became a problem for the hospital authorities as he set about launching a reform movement. “There were many disappointments in his life. As far as his drinking is concerned, I don’t defend myself, since I favoured it myself, then now. His was a slow suicide. He would eat nothing. Just one slice of bread, a cup of tea. Some curry in a saucer with a bit of potato and a piece of meat that he did not eat. He would dip a slice of bread in the curry and eat it. That was his average daily intake. Once he opened a bottle, he would not cork it till it was done. He would charge twenty rupees for a story and a bottle cost seventeen rupees in those days. At night the bottle would lie under his bed and whenever he woke up, he would take a swig from it without water.”

Muzaffar Ali Syed asked how a man who loved his children to distraction could be so selfish as to spend what he earned on drink. Prof Asar replied that what Manto earned through the daily story he wrote, went to buy his drink, but income from the ice factory allotted in his name by Qudratullah Shahab went straight to Begum Manto. Hamid Jalal, Manto’s nephew has also recorded in a piece he wrote during his uncle’s life and with his knowledge: “To restore his family’s confidence in him, he has done several things to keep himself in check and break out of the vicious circle … He has signed away all his rights in (sic) his writings, past, present and future. All accounts are now in his wife’s name. He cannot now borrow even a rupee from a publisher, unless his wife signs the receipt.”

A couple of years before Manto died, he was examined at a hospital where the doctors pronounced that his liver was not functioning. Manto reacted characteristically. “What do you mean, not functioning! It will have to function. You will see, doctor, that it will function. How dare it not function!” And, miraculously, his words came true. Muzaffar Ali Syed recalled that once when he was with Manto, he heard an older woman, probably Manto’s mother-in-law, shout angrily from inside the house, “Why is he alive? Why doesn’t he die?” Manto rose and closed the door. Prof Asar said: “The older lady must be expressing her daughter’s feelings.”

Manto, Prof Asar said in answer to a question, was neither for nor against Iqbal and hardly ever mentioned him. It was Ghalib he was totally devoted to. Once he wrote that after Ghalib, if truth be told, no one had the right to write poetry. He did not like talking about politics. He moved from Bombay because he wanted to live among his people and he also thought he would have a larger following of readers here, though he was disappointed on both counts. Asked if he ever expressed any regret, Prof Asar answered, “No, never. He always lived in a haze of optimism; pessimism was foreign to his nature. He was a warrior who would never have surrendered.”

His famous self-composed epitaph that does not appear on his grave says it all: “Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto. With him lie buried all the arts and mysteries of short story writing. Under tons of earth he lies, wondering who of the two is the greater short story writer: God or he.”

Tehmina Durrani once said to me, “You will be surprised how many Pakistanis beat their wives.” When I looked sceptical, she suggested that I name five ideally married couples from Lahore whom she also knew and she would tell me if the men beat their wives or not. The five couples I chose after some thought, I was quite shocked to learn were made up of wife-beaters. That was the end of my innocence in such matters. In other words, it was not only the former Lion of the Punjab who beat his wife as a sport, but many seemingly civilised Pakistani men did the same. Tehmina said most women pray that their husbands would reach middle age quickly so that their physical strength ebbed and they felt less inclined to use it on their wives.

In Birmingham, England, some years ago, Azra Saeed, close friend of Zia Mohyeddin’s and “Iggy” Ghazanfar’s former mother-in-law, who worked with bettered women from Pakistan and India told me that mistreatment of women was common. She told stories that made your hair stand on end. In America, where there is now a huge Indian-Pakistani-Bangladeshi population, the number of battered women and those thrown out on the street by their husbands is running high. I am told by a Sonia Mansoor, a bright young Pakistani lawyer from Lahore who has recently completed her LLM from Columbia and who is working in New York for Sanctuary for Family Centre for battered women’s legal services and liaise with ‘Sakhi’, a women’s group that the proportions of the phenomenon are alarming. “You will be surprised how common it is,” she told me.

Sonia said unlike Pakistan, in India newspaper ads were used by many families to find suitable matches. Quite a few Indian men living abroad used this method to find wives. What was advertised and what existed on the ground were often two different things. The computer software expert often turns out to be a gasoline dispenser or a dishwasher or a handyman or a cab driver. Many of the women are without an education and arrive here dreaming of a happy life of luxury. What greets them on arrival is often shocking. Long-distance marriages are also common with Pakistanis. A mistreated woman simply has no idea what to do. Some of them, Sonia, said cannot even find their way to a subway station or know how to call 911, the emergency help line. They have no friends, no family, just nothing. If their husbands beat them up or push them out of the house, they simply do not know what to do or where to go. It is shocking, she said, what some of our women go through.

Pakistan, Sonia, said had not signed the Hague Convention, the international treaty governing jurisdictional questions in international child abduction cases. However, off and on there are successes that keep people like Sonia going. She narrates the story of how New York local courts and a local Pakistani court were able to work together to successfully recover children who had been unlawfully abducted to Pakistan. The story also illustrates how the Center for Battered Women’s Legal Services at Sanctuary For Families that works for the rights of domestic violence victims, was able to mobilise and put together a cross- border effort involving local legal and social services groups, the US State Department, the US Consulate in Pakistan, and the admirable Hina Jilani in Lahore to defend the rights of a desperate and helpless immigrant mother.

Sonia works in the greater metropolitan area of New York City, helping South Asian immigrant women who, as a result of domestic violence, are in need of assistance on immigration, family law, public benefits and criminal justice matters. She said many South Asian immigrant women who are victims of domestic violence are not only unaware of the legal remedies available to them in the United States, but also face a host of cultural and linguistic barriers that obstruct their access to legal services and support structures. Sonia has also worked in the past on honour killings, dowry deaths, the Hadood laws dealing with rape and adultery and post-divorce maintenance.

This is the story she told me though the names used are not real. In November 2002, on an otherwise uneventful afternoon, Fatima, a Pakistani woman, was dropped off by her husband, Ghani at a friend’s place in Brooklyn. He told her that he would pick her up after grocery shopping. Several hours later, he called her saying he was running late, but would arrive soon. He did not. Tired of waiting inside, she came out and stood on the street till it was midnight. Cold and scared, she got into a cab and returned home, but found the apartment door locked and the lights off. The landlord told her that her husband had left for Pakistan for good with the two children, a one-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy. Fatima was devastated but recovered enough after some time to call the police which came and arranged for her to be put up for the night. She called the Pakistan consulate the next day and was directed by someone to phone ‘Sakhi’ which works closely with the city’s Sanctuary. When questioned, she told them of the beatings and abuse she had suffered through her years of marriage at the hands of Ghani.

Eventually, a writ of habeas corpus was filed on her behalf in Brooklyn Family Court in December 2002 which was granted by the judge and her husband directed to return the children to the mother by 12 March 2003. The service of the process was a problem because Ghani was in Pakistan. Fatima also learnt that Ghani had attempted to serve her parents with divorce papers. That is where Sonia cames in. She had spent a year in Pakistan during which she had also worked with Hina and Asma Jilani’s legal aid cell for women like Fatima. Sonia returned to Pakistan and Hina Jilani filed a habeas corpus writ in the Lahore High Court for the return of Fatima’s children. After two hearings, the court ordered Ghani to appear with the children. His home was also raided by the police.

That was when Ghani decided to return to the US with the children, sought Fatima and proposed a reconciliation, an offer she found insincere and unacceptable. Since the New York court judgment for the children’s recovery was already out, Ghani was picked up by the police and the two children returned to the mother. Fatima has managed to survive through these traumatic events because of the help and guidance she received, both here and in Pakistan. She and her children have been moved into a shelter so that they are safe. Her needs are being met by Sanctuary, the New York Asian Women’s Center, and some other organisations. What Fatima was able to accomplish, other battered or mistreated Asian women can accomplish as well, provided they know their rights. The tragedy is that the vast majority does not know its rights and never may. Many women are thus fated to suffer abuse and mistreatment at the hands of men to whom they find themselves married.

Well, as stories go, there is nothing to report from here that would match Prime Minister Vajpayee and President Musharraf’s meeting in Fortress Islamabad which had more men guarding its cargo of VIPs during the South Asian summit than Alexander the Great had on any of his campaigns.

However, we living stateside have not been without our bit of excitement. Britney Spears for one. She was married before breakfast and divorced not long after. Of all the short marriages there have been among showbiz people, this may well have been the shortest. That girl is going to go far. Only twenty-two and married and divorced all in one breath. If she keeps going at this pace, there is no question she would break Miss Elizabeth Taylor’s record many times over. And that brings me to Shashi Tharoor, the young Indian head of UN information and the fastest rising star — in fact an already risen star — in the UN system. To a gathering he was addressing in New York once, he said, “Well, as Elizabeth Taylor said to her last husband, ‘I shan’t keep you long.’”

But to return to Britney, her official website carries the following announcement under the heading Britney Spears’ nuptials. “On Saturday, January 3rd, Britney Spears and a friend took a joke too far by getting married. Britney and Mr Alexander have filed for an annulment which will become official on Monday, January 5th.” End of announcement. “Sufficient unto the day …” I suppose. The groom said they were not drunk when they got married; in fact, they had just finished watching The Texas Chainsaw Murders. It is clear little good comes out of Texas, including …

Back in her hometown of Kentwood, Louisiana, a report in the New York Times says, “they forgave the short shorts, the tart tops and even the juicy smooch with Madonna. But this time, enough is enough. Many of the good folk of Kentwood say they are severely disappointed after the pride and joy of their town, the pop idol Britney Spears, married a hometown boy last Saturday and then cut him loose after 55 hours. She, like, broke his heart.”

Those 55 hours will haunt the hometown boy for the rest of his life. The newspaper says his front lawn is full of paparazzi and he is not amused. “I’m getting really aggravated with all this! I want y’all off my property!” he told a group of reptile reporters and cameramen. The wedding, if that’s what it was, took place at the Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. This was no flower-carrying, white silk-gowned bride, but one in a pair of ripped jeans and a baseball cap. The groom was dressed as he was about to mow his lawn.

The townsfolk are worried about young Jason Alexander, son of an auto mechanic. “That boy’s going to lose his mind,” said one resident. Before Britney put this town of 2,200 people on the map of the world, the most profitable thing to come out it were trucks packed with spring water or fluffy white chickens. Thirty per cent of the people live below the poverty line. One would have thought that with the $100 million dollars that she is worth, the pop queen would have done something for the town. She hasn’t, but she has built a mini-mansion for herself. The city’s best eating-place is called Burger Basket and Britney has been seen there when she visits home.

According to the New York Times, one of the Kentwood rules is: don’t drop by Britney’s father’s house, because he’s got big, mean dogs and two summers ago he ran off a group of teenage Britney fans (all girls) with a pistol in his shorts. The town has a Britney museum though.

Meanwhile, the hard luck story of the month is surely that of Ms Elecia Battle of Cleveland, Ohio, who is a pharmacy worker and who says the lottery ticket that has just won $162 million is hers, except that we only have her word for it because as she left the store where she had bought it, she dropped her purse and when she picked it up, she did not realise that the ticket was not there.

In the meantime, the Mega Million 11-state lottery organisation has given the loot to Mrs Rebecca Jemison, a 34 year old African-American hospital worker who says it was she who bought the winning ticket and she has the ticket to prove it. She added that Ms Battle’s claim made her laugh and it was unfortunate that “someone would think of something like this.”

Ms Battle’s lawyer is, however, upbeat and says he is going to fight it out in the courts. And that is as good a story as any to show how the world’s lawyers make money.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

KH Khurshid, who was the Quaid-e-Azam’s private secretary from 1944 to 1947, did not write a book on him although he planned to do that one day. It was not to be because he died in a tragic road accident in 1988. Some months after his death, his papers revealed extensive notes he had made some years earlier, obviously with the idea of eventually writing a firsthand account of his days with the Quaid. I brought that material together in 1990 in a slim volume called Memories of Jinnah.

Why I narrate this is because as I finished reading Hindutva demystified by a former Indian civil servant, Virendra Prakash, who lives in Washington and who gave me a copy of it some days ago, I recalled a passage at the conclusion of Khurshid’s memoir.

Khurshid writes: “Young and enthusiastic, when he (the Quaid) returned from Britain, he believed that India was a nation as Great Britain was a nation and, as such, worked for the abolition of separate electorates and for the establishment of Hindu-Muslim unity. But he soon discovered that it was not so. The closer he came to the Hindu nationalist leaders, the more familiar he grew with their ‘Hindutva’, that curious mixture of religion and politics. No less a person than Rajaji (C Gopalacharya) admitted as late as 1947, ‘I have always assumed that we were better than other people, that under the leadership of a man who had somehow found the secret of combining religion and politics without compromising his politics or contaminating his religion, we would make rapid strides as soon as independence had been achieved.’ And yet it was Mr Jinnah who was denounced as the reactionary, the medieval politician who had mixed religion and politics … To a true nationalist like Jinnah, it was a big blow that people could no longer be considered sons of the soil but as Hindus and Muslims.”

The Quaid gave up because he could not deal with Hindutva. What a pity that today the party in power in India is the BJP whose political philosophy and appeal are based on Hindu exclusivity, the same creed that drove the great Indian nationalist Muhammad Ali Jinnah to take a separate road that ultimately led to Pakistan. Ironically the rise of the BJP or more accurately the Sangh Parivar – which is how the entire Hindu supremacy movement is best described – in India rings no alarm bells in Western capitals where radicalism has only one name: Islam or its extremist manifestations of recent years. In fact the word “fundamentalism” has become almost a synonym for Islam.

And that brings me to Prakash’s book, a work of both commitment and careful research. What does the average senior Pakistani civil servant do after retirement? He plays golf, he cheats at bridge or he overnight turns into a scholar of Islam or an expert on international affairs. He doesn’t write books. Prakash, a former central secretary, points out: “India is too vast, too eclectic in its outlook, too poor and immersed in the struggle for survival and for a better future to be distracted by the diabolic ventures promoted by the Parivar in the name of Hindutva, misrepresented as a proxy for Hinduism, but, in reality, the very antithesis of it.”

Prakash calls the Parivar philosophy’s implications for India “suicidal.” He writes, “India today stands at the crossroads of history. Either the Sangh’s Hindutva in its present poisonous form will survive or will the India of the dreams of the founding fathers as enshrined in the constitution.” He believes that the time has come for all good people in India to “stand up and be counted on the side of the modern, progressive India of tomorrow.” He stresses that the “nature of the beast one faces must be recognised” because Hindutva is the exact opposite of Hinduism.

Prakash writes that the agenda of the Hindutva group of entities remains frozen in time in the mindsets they acquired in the first quarter of the last century. They seem to be still living in an India governed by foreigners, not by an overwhelming Hindu majority, “not by some ‘secularist/communist’ renegades but by the Sangh’s own outstanding ‘swayam sewaks’, Vajpayee and Advani.” Visions of Muslim militancy prevailing over the Hindus and their way of life continue to be invoked by the Parivar to create fear.

He quotes a chilling passage from a 1939 speech Madhorao S Golwalkar, one of the founding fathers of the Hindutva movement, “To keep the purity of the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging (of) the country of the Semitic races, the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and Cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan (not Hindustan) to learn and profit by.” This longest serving guru of the RSS went on to declare, “The foreign races in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no ideas but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture of the Hindu nation, and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race or may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment, not even citizen’s rights.”

Clearly, argues Prakash, the RSS believes that their majority in India gives Hindus the right to force Muslims to stay in India “wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation.” An RSS resolution passed in March 2002 warned Muslims that their safety lay in the goodwill of the majority and called the post-Godhra violence “natural and spontaneous.” The Sangh Parivar, the author maintains, believes that with the BJP in power, the Hindu Rashtra has already arrived and the minorities have now to live at the majority’s sufferance. Obviously, were this to become the basis of the Indian state that the Sanghis want, India will be plunged into a bloody civil war which would eventually results in its disintegration as a nation-state.

Prakash is, however, confident that the RSS and its lumpen associates like the VHP and Bajrang Dal are on their last legs, and it is their desperation that explains the ferocity of their militancy in Gujarat. It was Kargil that saved the BJP’s fortunes, he maintains. He doubts though that the Parivar can “reinvent” itself. According to him, “The writing on the wall is clear and unmistakable: the strategy of Hindu communal mobilisation has run its course. It may not be in the process of breathing its last. It may be heard of, here and there, but as a long-term nationwide source of popular support, it has become too weak to keep the BJP going as a decisive political entity.”

One can only hope for the sake of the subcontinent that Virendra Prakash is right.

The first Postcard USA of the year 2004, were it to be given a colour, would naturally have to be painted orange. We have been under Code Orange since before Christmas and we remain under its baleful protection, we are assured, now that the revelries of the New Year are over and all those who will ultimately go to a no-hangover heaven are nursing jumbo-sized hangovers.

News, meanwhile, comes from the most faithful strip of the Land of the Faithful, namely NWFP, that the deputies of God paraded the streets of Peshawar all night and when the hour of midnight struck, loud speakers from every mosque proclaimed at full volume that God is Great. The way these people continue to keep assuring themselves that God is Great makes me suspicious of them.

They should realise that the Great Lord who made all that is in heavens and earth and the great beyond and what is beyond the great beyond, has no need of a reassurance from the bearded brigade that has just supped with the devil and is pledged to remain at the self-same table of infamy and bitter drink till the next announcement — Meray Aziz Humwatno — comes dancing down Pakistan’s airwaves.

But to return to the Land of Code Orange, all we have been told is that there was a great deal of ‘chatter’ that the vast spying network operated by the custodians of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave picked up and felt sufficiently alarmed by what they heard or half heard to turn the dial from yellow to orange or whatever the earlier colour was.

The funny thing about it all is that the big chief of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, after having scared the people of this country with what might happen to them and theirs at Christmas time, advised them also to relax and have a great holiday. Rightly did people wonder if Mr Ridge had had more spiked eggnog than was good for him, considering that it is just not possible for anyone to be under imminent threat of something horrible happening to him and his country and to relax and enjoy himself at the same time.

The great gathering of revellers, merrymakers and tourists from Japan (where else!) at New York’s Times Square took place, as it always has. To thumb their noses at Mr Ridge, quite a few of those who had braved the cold and the Code were wearing orange parkas and windcheaters. Some had orange hats on. Over their heads flew more helicopters than one is likely to see over the skies of Baghdad these days. Hundreds of policemen and women, both the uniformed variety and the plainclothes type, were around, looking at everyone with much suspicion. There were body searches and those found in a state of advanced happiness, thanks to the cup that cheers, were said to have been escorted out. Who knows when a guy with about the same quantity of highly inflammable alcohol in his veins as blood may ignite because of the heat generated by all those cops in the crowd? Fortunately, nobody caught fire which means old Johnny Walker can continue to grow stronger with each day. May Mr Walker’s tribe flourish!

Some really odd things happened though, such as what the Ridge boys have begun to describe as ‘reverse screening’ at airports. Every passenger who arrived on a British Airways flight from London at Washington’s Dulles airport on New Year’s Eve was searched and questioned, and perhaps even fingerprinted. For three hours, hundreds of tired men and women stood in lines answering such questions as: what is the name of the pet dog you had as a child? Finally, everyone was let through. Homeland Security has a lot of egg on its face and should at least have the decency to buy everyone who was on that flight a three-day Caribbean cruise.

Which is a note as good as any to wish everyone back home a happy new year, despite the MMA and its mobile virtue enforcement police.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Sara Suleri Goodyear teaches English at Yale and has done so for years. Her first book Meatless days was elegiac, and so is Boys will be boys which the Columbia University Press has just published. The name is not hers but her father’s who chose it for the autobiography he never wrote. ZA Suleri, whom his six children called Pip, their acronym for “patriotic and preposterous’, is portrayed with love and indulgence, peppered here and there with impatience over his imperious style, by a daughter who left home because she wanted to carve out a life of her own.

When her first book was published, she was still Suleri; about ten years ago when she was nearing forty and quite happily single, she surprised herself by accepting a proposal from Austin Goodyear (yes, the tyre people) who had a daughter from an earlier marriage older than Sara. Being the man of business he was, his proposal did not come one summer evening when the full moon was hanging in the sky and he was down on one knee waiting to slip a ring on her finger. It came as a prenuptial contract drawn by his lawyer that was complete in every respect except the bride’s signatures. Sara read it over the breakfast table and said yes, adding that he should get on with the arrangements before she changed her mind. They were married a couple of days later and still are; something, she writes, that would please her father. However, contrary to her father’s ardent wish, she has been unable to make Mr Goodyear join the ranks of the faithful, for he remains a good Christian who loves his yacht Mermaid and his large farm in Maine where he is often overheard swearing at his sheep.

ZA Suleri was Sara’s father and to most of us our fathers are heroes, even when we find them exasperating at times, as she did hers. She writes tenderly about him and her mother, a Welsh girl Suleri met in London in 1945-46, who died in a tragic accident in Lahore where she taught at the Punjab University. She also movingly invokes the memory of her sister Ifat who was criminally run over by her husband in Lahore for reasons that remain unclear, her sister Tillat, her stepsister Nuzhat (who died of a stroke some years ago), and her brothers Shahid and Irfan. She also writes about Lahore, a city she is nostalgic about, and not only because her parents and her sister Ifat lie in its earth.

However, there are some troubling bits in the book, such as her constant use of the ugly word “Paki” for Pakistani and the name she calls Muslims – “Mozzies” – which I at least have never heard or read anywhere. It is not possible that Sara doesn’t know how offensive “Paki” is. Recently, the Washington Post used it in a column by Al Kamen and when I pointed it out Kamen phoned me to apologise, saying he did not know the offensive nature of the word, and gracefully apologising for its use in his next column. If Sara has used these words playfully – and she seems to have – it shows a lack of sensitivity that is surprising in a person who writes with such subtle poignancy and who has so much poetry in her.

While I am at it, I might as well point out some mistakes of fact that Sara makes. In 1965, Suleri was made head of Inter-Services Public Relations, not “director of the Intelligence agency” and put in a full colonel’s uniform (on seeing which for the first time, the late Brig Mohammad Usman’s orderly came rushing into his GHQ office and said that he had just seen a “ naqli kernail”). I should add that after a few briefings, foreign newsmen in Pindi began to call Suleri SSW, short for “ Shastri’s Secret Weapon”. Begum Akhtar, Sara should know, never sang at the Open Air Theatre in Lahore, nor did the Sabri brothers perform there because qawwali was not part of the All Pakistani Music Conferences organised by Hayat Ahmed Khan. Nur Jehan was never called “Bebe” nor did the Pakistan government confer the title of malika-e-tarrunum or “melody queen” on her. The song Mera sohna sheher Kasur ni she sang in 1965 not 1971. Also the Punjabi word sona does not mean ‘golden’ but ‘beautiful’. Sara also confuses the 1965 and 1971 wars though I readily concede both were confusing affairs. The book is interspersed with Urdu verses or single lines of verse but the translations, without exception, are inelegant and often wrong. Surprising in an author who is such a fine poet and prose stylist.

Zeno, Sara should have known, was not “a columnist” who was an “arch enemy” of her father, but the much revered Muhammad Safdar Mir, the Pakistan Times’ culture and literature columnist. I must also assure her that Madam Nur Jehan never had a facelift in Switzerland or elsewhere. She was just beautiful. Again, “ falsas and jamans” are not spring but sawan or rainy season fruits. And it was not Ghalib but Zauq who said that he would exchange his entire poetic output for that single verse of Momin that Sara quotes.

At the end of this slim book, Sara wonders why her father’s country did not take time to recognise the passion with which he loved it. The fact is that ZA Suleri remained closely aligned with almost all governments, just and unjust, military, quasi-military or civilian-dictatorial. He passionately supported every martial law, every impostor, every strutting general from Ayub onwards. Had he been alive today, he would without doubt have been the greatest of Musharraf’s supporters. I always wondered how he was able to act as cheerleader to every dictatorship and still keep writing about the Quaid-e-Azam and his concept of Pakistan. Nothing could have been more abhorrent to “my leader” than military rule, which always found in Suleri its most ardent and enthusiastic justifier. Suleri was imposed on the Pakistan Times twice, each time by military rulers. When Zulfikar Ali Bhutto fired him live on the air in his December 20, 1971 speech to the nation, we who worked under him against our will began to dance at PT and Imroze.

Suleri did more harm to a free press in Pakistan, to civil liberties and the idea of a representative government in all the years he was in positions of editorial authority than any other individual one can cite. Every authoritarian government needed a Suleri and every authoritarian government got him. When Yahya Khan came to Washington in 1970, I had a sharp exchange with him at a Pakistan embassy reception. He was going round asking everyone what they did. When he came to me, I told him that I was the Pakistan Times correspondent in Washington, then added (because Suleri had just been imposed on us as chief editor), “But I am not one of Suleri’s boys.” Yahya Khan glowered at me, “ Bachoo,” he said, using one of his favourite words, “If you are not Suleri’s boy, you will be nobody’s boy.” Next day when I went to see HK Burki and others accompanying Yahya at press counsellor SN Qutb’s home in Bethesda, Burki told me over a gin and tonic, “ Toon fikr na kar, ainaah nahin rehna.” (Don’t you worry; these guys are not going to last). When I returned to Lahore, both Yahya and Suleri were still very much there, but I must say it to Suleri’s credit that he did not fire me but ordered that my byline not be printed. He also asked me to continue my column “Of this and that”, but under a penname. So, if anyone remembers those days and wonders who “Gypsy” of the Pakistan Times was, it was I.

In any case, all that is in the past. I am sure if Suleri had not been Sara’s loving father but her editor, she would have revolted against him the same way we did. Since Suleri was so fond of Ghalib, let me end this column with a line from the poet: Dhanpa kafan nai daagh-e-ayoob-e-brehangi. (Covered under my shroud are the shame and stigmas of my nakedness).

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