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“At the taxpayer’s expense” is one phrase in Pakistan to which no one pays any attention, regardless of who is occupying the catbird seat in Islamabad, a city that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto once described as designed for a coup d’etat.

Money does not grow on trees, especially in a country where most of them have been axed anyway, so where does it come from? Will those who rule us, almost always contrary to our will and invariably against our consent, come to realise one day that the money they spend on their upkeep at home, travel abroad and fanciful schemes everywhere else is not theirs but ours? Unlikely, but were that moment of introspection come to pass, will it also occur to them that every penny they order spent must have full and reasonable justification.

This preamble should be excused but every time I become aware of another blowout of public funds, I think of men like Mumtaz Hasan who believed with a passion civil servants no longer seem to feel that public funds were a sacred trust. But those men are no longer around, nor the principles that moved them. Mumtaz Hasan once struck down a request from Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan for an increase in one of his official allowances and no more was said about it by the prime minister who not long after died for the country he had helped create, leaving nothing behind for his family except his honoured name. In March 1948, when the State Bank’s request to issue one-rupee currency notes was put up to the Quaid-i-Azam for his signatures by Mumtaz Hasan, the Quaid would not sign, until he was satisfied there was adequate backing for the issue. If there is no backing, he said, it would amount to a “fraud” on the people.

I recount these old tales to highlight the cavalier spending-spree on which all governments have indulged since the times of Ayub Khan. The latest of these pointless and unjustifiable spending exercises is yet another ambassadors’ conference in Islamabad. Our man in Washington has flown home, as has our representative at the United Nations. There may be more, but my access to official Pakistani sources in the city of Washington is not only limited but non-existent; so, as such, I am unable to provide the exact tally at the Islamabad diplomats’ jamboree.

What is the point of such “consultations”, one should ask? They cost large amounts of money which could be put to better use. They do not make the decision-makers any wiser. In any case, the style in Pakistan always has been that “competent authority” first decides what is to be done and then holds consultations of the kind that are taking place or have taken place in Islamabad in the wake of the AQ Khan affair. The consultations would have had some credibility or use if they had taken place before, rather than after, Dr Khan’s television appearance and Gen. Musharraf’s emotional news conference. Ambassadors may then perhaps have given their assessments of the international impact of what Dr Khan and General Musharraf were going to tell the world.

If the purpose of the present “consultations” is damage control, the government does not have to summon ambassadors from thousands of miles away when what they have to say — if they have to say anything at all — could have been said through the miscellany of communication means now available. Our ambassadors are more likely to speak honestly when at their stations than in a conference with the real power-wielders presiding. There they would only say what they think is safe and what they believe the top guns want to hear. After all, there is not one but several examples of what happens to those who speak their minds. They are beheaded, like the bearers of ill tidings in ancient times.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Sir Vidyadhar S Naipaul, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and husband to our own long-lost Nadira Khanum Alvi, is at it again. In his “last interview in India”, he told an Indian journalist who asked about India’s “fractured past, fissured present” and future that “fractured past” was too polite a way to describe India’s “calamitous millennium”. The millennium began, declaimed Naipaul, with the Muslim invasions and the grinding down of the Hindu-Buddhist culture of the north. “This is such a big and bad event that people still have to find polite, destiny-defying ways of speaking about it. In art books and history books, people write of the Muslims ‘arriving’ in India, as though the Muslims came on a tourist bus and went away again. The Muslim view of their conquest of India is a truer one. They speak of the triumph of the faith, the destruction of idols and temples, the loot, the carting away of the local people as slaves, so cheap and numerous that they were being sold for a few rupees.”

Warming to his preferred theme, Naipaul said, “The architectural evidence – the absence of Hindu monuments in the north – is convincing enough. This conquest was unlike any other that had gone before. There are no Hindu records of this period. Defeated people never write their history. The victors write the history. The victors were Muslims. For people on the other side it is a period of darkness. Indian history is written about as a matter of rulers and kingdoms shifting and changing. This is why it all seems petty and boring to read and hard to remember. But there is a larger and more tragic and more illuminating theme. That theme is the grinding down of Hindu India.”

Naipaul said that in 1565, Vijayanagar in the south was destroyed and its great capital city laid to waste. In 1592 the “terrible Akbar” (this must be the first time Akbar the Great has been called Akbar the Terrible) ravaged Orissa in the east. The wealth and creativity, the artisans and architects of the kingdoms of Vijayanagar and Orissa were destroyed, their light put out. Those regions are still among the poorest in India.

Asked about the Hindu resurgence and militancy in India, Naipaul replied that India did not have a secular character, and whether Hindu militancy is “dangerous or not, it is a necessary corrective to history”. As to whether an un-partitioned India would have worked or not, Naipaul replied, “No. As soon as the poet Iqbal, the convert, had made his speech calling for a separate state, that state more or less became inevitable. And considering the Islamic movements of the last 30 years, nearly all the energy of an un-partitioned India would have fruitlessly gone into holding itself together.”

Asked why Pakistan so easily slips into martial and dictatorial ways, while democracy is never threatened in India, Naipaul, finding himself on his favourite wicket, answered that West Pakistan was not particularly well-educated. It had almost no political thinkers. It had had only about 90 years of British rule and institutions. It was easy for those institutions to be brushed aside. Jinnah was in many ways an attractive, secular man, but the snare of the Islamic movement he unleashed was like the snare of the Islamic movement in Iran. It assumed that out of a perfect Islam everything would flow: good institutions, good laws and a model citizenry. There was no need to think further; everything would come with the faith. It was also worth remembering that Islamic societies are not democratic in the modern way. Islamic societies need the Quran, the Law and a severe ruler.”

Could he see Islam working out a reconciliation with other faiths on the subcontinent? Naipaul’s reply was short and blunt, “There can be no reconciliation. Islam is a religion of fixed laws. This goes contrary to everything in modern India. Also, the convert’s deepest impulse is the rejection of his origins.” He also defended India going nuclear, arguing that it is important for India to operate at the limit of technology. “India must never again fall behind. I actually think that the subcontinent is safer now,” he added.

He said the Mughal buildings are foreign buildings. “They are a carry-over from the architecture of Isfahan. In India they speak of the desert. They cover enormous spaces and they make me think of everything that was flattened to enable them to come up. Humayun’s tomb is, I suppose, the chastest and the best. The Taj is so wasteful, so decadent and in the end so cruel that it is painful to be there for very long. This is an extravagance that speaks of the blood of the people.”

Naipaul can’t go without kicking someone highly revered in the face, so he called the saintly Vinoba Bhave “half-witted, the mimic mahatma” and Jyoti Basu “the mimic Marxist”, who might be embalmed by his followers like Lenin and put on show in the Calcutta Maidan.

When asked if he agreed that Christianity and Islam had enriched India, Naipaul said “Christianity did not damage India the way Islam had… When you talk of Islam’s enriching of Indian culture, you are thinking of things like the food and the music and the poetry.” He, however, conceded that Islam and Christianity had “altered the world forever” giving it the social ideas of brotherhood, charity and the feeling of man for man. He also felt that these two revealed religions had “done their work” and had “little more to offer”.

He called Mahatma Gandhi “uneducated and never a thinker”. Gandhi, he explained, was a historical figure who came at a particular moment and turned all his drawbacks into religion. He used religion to awaken the country in a way that none of the educated leaders could have done. “He has absolutely no message today. People talk too much about Gandhi and study him too little.” He called Gandhi’s first book “so nonsensical it would curl the hair of even the most devoted admirer”. He said he knew of no Indians who actually read Gandhi. “They take from him some vague idea of a great redeeming holiness and they are free to ignore the practical side – Gandhi the hater of dirt, the hater of public defecation. That last is still very much an Indian sport. In fact, the Gandhian idea of piety and a very holy poverty is used now to excuse the dirt of the cities, the shoddiness of the architecture. By some inversion, Indians have used the very idea of Gandhi to turn dirt and backwardness into much-loved deities.” That sounds like Naipaul should sound and has always sounded, his nose up in the air sniffing the clouds.

Sadly, Jalil Mir died in 2000, but had he been alive, in him we would have had a man who could bring back to us the history that we have forgotten. It has been said that those who do not remember their past, should not hope to have a future.

In this town called Washington, the man who really calls the shots is not the gentlemanly Colin Powell or the Grey Eminence, otherwise known as Dick Cheney — a name straight out of a Mickey Spillane crime thriller — or the Snake Lady Condoleezza Rice, but old Rummy, more formally addressed as Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defence and master archer, gunslinger and swordsman at the Pentagon, that geometrical monstrosity next to the Arlington cemetery guaranteed to beat any other building in the world — including the President House in Islamabad — for sheer ugliness.

Rumsfeld loves to make war and it is he and not Powell at the State Department who presides over the mayhem in Iraq and the deadly cat and mouse game with the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The generals do not like him and he does not like the generals overly. He has often rubbed them on the wrong side and taken decisions that some see as militarily unsound.

However, since it is America and not Pakistan, which has been under a never-ending night of the generals, it is the civilian’s word that carries. Our defence secretary and indeed the PPP defector who is now the defence minister would be lucky if they were able to get the time of day from the Pindi brass.

Having established what a big dude Donald Rumsfeld is, it is no small wonder that he should receive not the ambassador of Pakistan — winging his way to Pakistan at the poor taxpayer’s expense as I write this — or our recently departed Minister of Information and Broadcasting, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed (who had the great distinction of having tea with President Bush under the same roof as 4,000 others) or even our visiting generals, but a journalist from Pakistan.

In the three days that Ahmed Rashid of the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Telegraph of London (and occasionally the Daily Times) has been here, every door has been thrown open to him. On Thursday afternoon, as he finished an address at the School for Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, attended by every member of the South Asian mafia, except Stephen Cohen (who believes army rule and Pakistan are made for each other), it was announced by the host that Mr Rashid could not stay longer — there were still several raised hands in the auditorium — because he had a meeting with Mr Donald Rumsfeld. The announcement caused a hush to fall over the hall. “In this town you don’t go any higher,” someone said to me.

Ahmed Rashid looked almost embarrassed, and even more so when who should appear at the door to take him, but the comely Ms Robin Raphel, former assistant secretary of state for South Asia, and currently doing something big and important and perhaps secret at the American Defence University. Before I could shout to Ahmed across the room “Give my regards to all at Daily Times,” he had been whisked away.

Ahmed Rashid in Washington turned out to be a hard man to keep pace with. He spoke on Afghanistan at the US Institute of Peace, held meetings at the State Department and briefed senior congressional aides on Capitol Hill. He did two if not three of what they call ‘power lunches’. I am not sure he was able to find any time to impart some of his wisdom to the hit and run crowd that mans (and at least in one case, womans) the Embassy of Pakistan. Somebody said he was staying with the ambassador but that did not worry me as His Excellency enjoys the reputation of not listening but holding forth interminably.

And why is Ahmed Rashid such a hot number in Washington? Because he is now acknowledged as one of the leading authorities on Afghanistan. And that notwithstanding the fact that he speaks neither Pushtu, nor Dari nor Persian. But he is good and he is clear-headed. I can’t say if the Rummys and the Roccas just listen to him or whether what he says modifies their thinking in any way, but what I do know is this. I once heard the late Gen. Ghulam Jilani say, “Those who preside over the destiny of states only see what they wish to see and only hear what they wish to hear.”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

One of the great Islamic scholars of our time who made his name in the early years of the last century was Maulvi Muhammad Ibrahim Sialkoti, a forebear, incidentally, of Professor Sajid Mir, the religious politician. He died nine years after independence, in 1956. If you grew up in Sialkot, it is impossible not to be aware of Maulvi Ibrahim. He is still remembered and revered, and one of the best-known mosques in the city is named after him.

I never thought I would make a connection with the great Islamic scholar in Washington, but the internet has shrunk the world in a way that can only be called miraculous. Some months ago, while gallivanting in cyberspace, my path crossed that of Dr Pervez Mir of New York who turned out to have a Sialkot connection. It transpired that he knew A Jalil Mir, a grandson of Maulvi Ibrahim, who, at his urging in 1992, had recorded his memories of old Sialkot in a 12 page handwritten note.

Those twelve pages recreate a world that is long vanished. Jalil Mir, who retired as postmaster general, writes about Sialkot’s antiquity, pointing out that the Aik Nullah that flows through the city is mentioned in the Upanishads. Sialkoti paper, also known as Man Singhi paper was famous all over the world. Papermaking here dates back to Emperor Akbar’s time and it was Raja Man Singh who, as governor of Kabul initiated the industry. The great saint of Sialkot, Imam Ali-ul-Haq, whom everyone calls Imam Sahib, lived in the 13th century, during the reign of Feroze Shah Tughlaq. Another renowned scholar produced by the city was Mullah Abdul Hakim, known in the Middle East as Fazil Lahori. Shah Jehan had him weighed in gold once and in silver twice. He is buried in Sialkot near the old Bijli Ghar.

Jalil Mir writes that around the middle of the 19th century Maulvi Ibrahim became a student of Maulvi Ghulam Hasan (whose grandson the late Munir Farooqi was a Lahore high court judge). Once Maulvi Mir Hasan, Iqbal’s teacher, came to Maulvi Ghulam Hasan’s mosque with his student to offer prayers, and Iqbal picked up Maulvi Mir Hasan’s shoes as a mark of respect. Maulvi Mir Hasan held Iqbal’s hand and told him, “If you must pick up anyone’s shoes, let those be Maulvi Ghulam Hasan’s, not mine.” Maulvi Mir Hasan was a great admirer of Sir Syed and would travel to Aligarh during vacations to see him.

Jalil Mir, however, finds the role of the people of Sialkot during 1857 “feeble-witted” because after joining the mutineers, they invited the local British commander to become their king. Mirza Ghulam Ahmed used to work at the Sialkot district courts. In Adda Pasrurian there used to be a buggy stand in front of the Lady Anderson Girls High School where he was often to be found counselling those who came to see him. A small mosque close to Allama Iqbal’s house became the first Ahmediyya mosque in the city. It was named after Hakim Mir Hisamuddin, first cousin of Maulvi Mir Hasan, who became a convert. In one of the side streets lived Mirza Ghulam Ahmed himself. The house next to the mosque was that of Maulvi Mir Hasan. The house preserved after Pakistan as Iqbal’s birthplace is not his, but that of his brother Babu Ata Mohammad, who became an Ahmedi. His son Sheikh Ijaz Ahmed retired as a joint secretary in the early years of Pakistan.

Maulana Obaidullah Sindhi, who was born a Sikh, was from Sialkot. He set up a “Hindustan Republic Government” in Afghanistan during World War I with Raja Mohinder Pratab as president and himself as prime minister. He knew Lenin and Trotsky personally and had lived in Turkey. Another Sialkoti who gained fame in those years was Dr Mohammad Iqbal Bhutta, a student of Maulvi Ibrahim. He exiled himself to Kabul and from there went to Russia, Turkey, Germany and Italy. It was on his account that Maulvi Ibrahim spent time in jail during World War Two and later remained under house arrest. Dr Bhutta, known as Dr Iqbal Shaidai, broadcast Axis propaganda from Rome. He then moved to Germany, but returned home after the Partition and lived with his nephew near the Lahore railway station. He was fluent in French, Italian and German and wrote in all three. He married abroad and one of his daughters was still living in Lyon in 1990, according to Jalil Mir.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz was a student of Maulvi Ibrahim. Sir Fazle Hussain started his legal practice from Sialkot, as did Sir Zafrulla Khan who came from Daska. Sir Fazle was one of the founders of the Anjuman-i-Islamia which is still active and runs several schools and orphanages. One of the most famous sons of Sialkot was Agha Mouhammad Safdar who lived in Adda Shahbaz Khan and was a member of the All Indian Khilafat Committee and a Congress leader.

The biggest name in the sports industry, Jalil Mir recounts, was that of Sardar Ganda Singh of Oberoi Sports. His brilliant deputy, Khawaja Hakim Din, ran the factory, whose entire workforce was Muslim. Sardar Ganda Singh would preside over one of the annual sessions of the Anjuman and also contribute to its funds.

According to Jalil Mir, the essential temperament of Sialkot is opposition to the government of the day. In 1931, Sialkot was the centre of the movement raging in Kashmir against the maharaja. The city was actively involved in the Khilafat agitation and became the base of the Ahrar. When the Pakistan movement gathered steam, Sialkot swung to its side and the Ahrar was routed. The city also rallied behind Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1970, but some years later wiped out the Pakistan People’s Party. Because of this volatility, the city hasn’t flourished, writes Jalil Mir. Because of Kashmir Sialkot has become a border town and although it earns Pakistan much foreign exchange, the city remains dirty and undeveloped.

Another great son was Khawaja Abdul Hamid Irfani, son-in-law of Iqbal’s elder brother Ata Muhammad. He it was who introduced Iqbal to Iran. The Indian politician Gulzari Lal Nanda also came from Sialkot. Another figure was the eminent philosopher Prof William Lilly of Murray College, who spent most of his working life there. His book on ethics remains a classic. Prof Lilly and Iqbal used to act as examiners in philosophy for Punjab University. “Iqbal was very strict when marking papers,” according to Prof Lilly. Jalil Mir also recalls that Indian journalist Kuldip Nayyar is the son of Dr Gurbakhsh Singh, LSMF, a “mona” Sikh from Sialkot, who ran his clinic from the city’s Trunk Bazar.

Sadly, Jalil Mir died in 2000, but had he been alive, in him we would have had a man who could bring back to us the history that we have forgotten. It has been said that those who do not remember their past, should not hope to have a future.

Anyone in Pakistan who thinks the worst is over after Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan’s confession on state television and President Pervez Musharraf’s press conference some days later is living in cuckooland. Pakistan’s troubles are not over: they may have just begun.

First things first. No one, but no one, is prepared to believe that what has been said on Pakistan television — which has less than a shimmering reputation for telling the truth — is no more than a donkey’s tail with the rest of the said donkey well out of sight in the barn, and a radioactive barn at that.

I am not sure if the functionaries of the government back home read American newspapers or listen to American television news shows with the same attention that the Embassy of Pakistan pays to them, which is to say, not a heck of a lot. But in case anyone is reading or listening, here or there, he should be under no illusion that anyone believes for a minute that Dr Khan was solely and singly responsible for the sale, stealth or smuggling of lethal nuclear materials and how-to-make-a-bomb primers.

This being Basant time, let it be said that though the Americans do not celebrate Basant they do use kite language. If what has been officially said on this bum business were said to an American, his response could well be, “So you think I fell off a Christmas tree. Go fly a kite Charlie.”

But let us skip the preliminaries and come to the heart of the matter. There are two scenarios. One boils down to Pakistan having confessed that its nuclear programme has been leaking like a sieve and the security of its nuclear assets has been repeatedly compromised by its declared and much-honoured ‘father’, Dr A.Q Khan. Since no reasonable person finds it possible to accept this explanation, the only other conclusion is that the sale of Pakistan’s nuclear secrets was a highly organised affair with the full knowledge and/or connivance of those occupying the highest offices of the state.

Whether it is scenario one or scenario two, we have established to the satisfaction of the entire world that we are a country that cannot ensure the security of its nuclear weapons and related assets. It goes without saying that Pakistan has flouted the assurances it had been extending internationally about its nuclear weapons being in safe and secure hands. It is irrelevant whether Dr Khan did it for money or ideology or whether the decision to hawk nuclear secrets for money or ideology was taken by the state itself.

Today, the world is justified in believing that Pakistan cannot be trusted and nuclear weapons are not safe in its hands. In a country where Maulana Masood Azhar is said to have disappeared from house custody without the government’s knowledge, a country where even traffic lights don’t work and when they do, they are not obeyed, is not exactly a country the world can feel terribly confident about when it comes to nuclear weapons, especially after the Great Confession.

I am not in the business of making predictions but let me make one for a change. Once the United States is through with its war on terrorism, it will turn towards Pakistan and there will be no dearth of people here screaming that the country that actually has weapons of mass destruction and a country that has failed to ensure their safety, is a country that must be deprived of those dangerous toys. Our nuclear assets will either be neutralised — much to the glee of India and Israel, among others — or they will be placed under such draconian regulations that we will have been denied both their use and their flaunting. And who would have brought all that about? None other than we ourselves.

But I want to end this Postcard on a lighter note. After Chaghi, Syed Mushahid Hussain suggested at a meeting held at the Information Ministry in Islamabad that small models of Mount Chaghi should be placed at every arrivals/departure lounge at Pakistan’s international airports to be given out as free gifts to foreign tourists. Why this imaginative suggestion that would have quadrupled our sagging tourism industry overnight was not given a run, only the Senator can say.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

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.

Washington has been suffering the kind of cold in the last few weeks that chills the bones and turns normally good-humoured people into sullen cynics who believe freezing rain and sleet to be the destiny of the human race. What gets your goat though is not so much the cold but what the weather people call the ‘wind chill factor’, which is nothing but a smart name for arctic winds or what the residents of Quetta call Qandhari.

The news from home has been as depressing as the weather. After President Pervez Musharraf’s press conference Thursday, there is little one can say in defence of those the country trusted with its scarce resources and its best-kept secrets. Next time, some of our friends in the press go shopping for heroes, one hopes they will be a little more circumspect. Meanwhile, one awaits their post-February 5 columns, although anyone who has read a book published a couple of years ago about the somersaults of certain gentlemen in this trade, would be well aware of their amazing talent for switching sides in nano-seconds.

The only cheering news here has been the brief visit of our talented information and broadcasting minister, the Squire of Lal Haveli and Rawalpindi’s Native Son, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed. What brought him to chilly Washington was a heart-warming invitation he received from the good Christian folk who hold the National Prayer Breakfast every year at about this time. Why they don’t organise the event when the cherry blossom are blooming, must be because those who have a hotline with the Almighty are not bothered by such mundane matters as icy roads and the wind chill factor.

The National Prayer Breakfast is always attended by the president and the first lady, both of whom are seated at the head table, which is placed on a raised platform and if you are on table No. 28, as Sheikh Rashid Ahmed was, you might have to tilt back your head a little to take a good look at the nation’s No. 1 couple. I can only apologise to the minister on behalf of some of our newspapers which ran utterly misleading stories stating that he was flying to Washington to have breakfast with President Bush. Breakfast he indeed did have under the same roof as Mr Bush but that pleasure he shared with around 4,000 others, though few of them had travelled thousands of miles to do so.

There is no rest for those who travel in the service of the nation. Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, who hasn’t had a minute to himself since came to these parts, was denied even a good night’s sleep Wednesday as he had to appear at the downtown Hilton hotel where the hotline-to-God breakfast was held — only two blocks from the White House — at an ungodly hour.

Our minister was found all suited-booted at his assigned Table No 28 at a quarter past seven. Mr and Mrs Bush did not appear until 45 minutes later and were gone in half an hour. Can there be anything more uncivilised than an invitation to an early morning breakfast on a winter day, even it is for the commendable purpose of praying for peace? Breakfast meetings, like chewing gum, are a vile American invention. I belong to the old school which frowns on any kind of conversation until after breakfast that has been preceded by a quiet cup of bed tea.

Sheikh Rashid Ahmed has always been popular with the press and is invariably good copy, even though some of his best lines cannot always be highlighted. He met some of us at the Pakistan Embassy with its imitation Sheesh Mahal entrance on Wednesday evening. He was tired but he was in his element. He said he was away from Pakistan at a time when he should have been there. Asked about India, he said he better not say much because the Indians take rather special notice of anything he says. He did not elaborate, which may be just as well.

To another question about Iran and Libya, he said he would rather not say anything as it might open a ‘Pundora box’. Asked about his government’s relationship with the MMA, he replied, “I always knew that in the end these people would go with us,” he added. He also spoke of ‘stabling’ the political situation as failure to do so would ‘destable’ it. He smiled when reminded of his earlier declaration that the MMA government in Peshawar was ‘do nafloo’n ki maar’ or two snappy supplications to God by way of thanks.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Everyone has his or her own Lahore. I miss the Lahore of the 1960s, a city which was much smaller, much quieter, where most people knew most other people, where there were no flung-out settlements, some of which today stand closer to Amritsar or Gujranwala than they are to Lahore, or what was Lahore.

However, cities change, as does everything. Iqbal called change the only permanence in this world. Lahore thirty-five years ago was not the noisy, traffic infested, pollution-riddled city it is today. Sardar Sadiq, that uncrowned king of Lahore’s Mall, and indeed all its streets, used to say he was going “foreign” when he was on his way to Gulberg. That Lahore is gone, as is Sardar Sadiq who lies in God’s little acre at Bibi Pakdaman, off Empress Road, whose given name nobody can pronounce or remember.

Cities grow and change but their essential character is preserved in Western countries and their spread controlled in a manner that takes care of the needs of those who live in them. I based last week’s column on Nadeem ul Haque’s diagnosis of what had gone wrong with Lahore and what could be done about it. Given the constraints of space, I wasn’t able to put forward all the ideas he came up with and all his profound observations. I do so now because Nadeem ul Haque has his finger on Lahore’s pulse, though he sits in Cairo where he works for the IMF (which should probably adopt the slogan: Repeat the medicine till the patient is dead). Our distinguished finance minister Shaukat Aziz has.

Nadeem ul Haque says sometime in the future travel between India and Pakistan will ease and thousands of people will come to Lahore. Those whose families moved from here in 1947, carry intense nostalgia for the city. Where are they going to stay? The Intercontinental came to Lahore in 1966 and the Hilton in the early seventies. Curiously, the Intercontinental left in the eighties while the Hilton claims to have been physically forced out despite an existing and valid management contract. Since then, no large multinational chain has come to Lahore, nor has a major hotel been built here. Why?

Lahore’s history, much of which lies along the Ravi, can generate tourist dollars, yet the Ravi remains undeveloped for tourism, with not a single hotel or commercial construction anywhere close to where it flows. The two major five-star hotels stand on the Mall, an area other commercial and tourist businesses would like to move to. But where is the space? Alhamra, the colonial Governor’s House, the Administrative Staff College and sundry government buildings, not to mention the sprawling golf course, have left no space for construction. The kothiwalas and their bureaucrats like Lahore to remain the sleepy town it was, so that they can maintain their lazy lifestyle. Nadeem ul Haque says when he has asked where a new hotel should go, the glitterati have answered, “Bedian, beyond Defence or Thokar Niaz Beg.” They look away when told that everywhere in the world, good hotels prefer city centres or tourist sites. To them, hotels and not kothis should be in the suburbia.

Yet despite the obstacles, some hotel chains have tried but with what results! The Holiday Inn is tucked away off Egerton road on a tiny lot with negligible parking space. A Best Western has come up at the corner of Liberty Market, again without a drive and parking. This shows that there is a demand for hotel construction but the regulators will make no space available for it. “Lahore continues to service the kothis. Housing schemes appear to be the only way to develop Lahore. The pattern of these schemes, which take years to approve and develop, has now been well established. The bulk of these schemes are plots for kothis. Some commercial space to service the kothi dwellers’ needs is allowed for, such as grocery stores and small shops. Commercial plots are limited to marlas. How can hotels, the palaces of the 21st century be built over marlas?” asks Nadeem ul Haque.

He also wants to know where Lahore’s commercial centre is. “Unlike other cities, spontaneous development has been stifled in Lahore through harsh government intervention and the myopic vision of city elders,” according to him. For years city planners herded all commerce on to the Mall, west of the Assembly. The Egerton Road-Davis Road region was denied commercial construction for years, while construction on Jail road and Ferozepur Road was limited and sporadic. The Main Boulevard in Gulberg was raring to go, and Abid Majeed Road made a few vain attempts. A Sheraton would have come up where the Globe Cinema used to stand, but the corps commander ruled that his backyard could be spied upon from the hotel and the project was killed, and with it thousands of jobs.

Years of legal battles led nowhere. Many projects withered on the vine; others were inordinately delayed, despite the bribes paid. The net result was limited commercial construction at high cost and of poor quality. Regulators recognising that the Mall corridor can no longer be the city’s commercial centre, because of space limitations and the developing suburbia of Gulberg and Defence, are now saying that the city centre must move to Gulberg.

There is a commercial centre in the segment northwest of the Governor’s House and new development is being encouraged southeast of GOR. The logical thing would be to allow these two developments to meet and form one large commercial centre for Lahore, which would ease transport costs and the costs of doing business. “However, given that our planners operate under the paradigm that colonial government property should not be privatised or otherwise used, this will never be allowed. The two emerging centres are now divided by colonial government property, the colonial governor’s mansion, the GOR, Staff College, State Guest House, Mayo Gardens etc. Vast tracts of colonial property will be maintained in the middle, regardless of the consequences for the city and its residents,” says Nadeem ul Haque.

The Governor’s House hides behind huge walls. “Why not drop the walls and allow a reputable hotel chain to come in? The space can also be used to develop other commercial activity, while preserving the flavour of colonial history. The Administrative Staff College, the State Guest House and the Civil Service Academy all need not sit on prime property. They can be moved out into the suburbs and possibly even into the countryside. The existing buildings on the Mall can then be used for theatres and commercial development. The linkage of the north-western and the south-eastern commercial developments will mean the elimination of that last preserve of colonialism: the GOR estate.

“Pakistan uses expensive international assistance to attain a higher economic growth rate and to alleviate poverty. Yet it wastes prime city centre property with useless government offices and residences. It also discourages commercial development through cumbersome regulation on both construction and rental. Bungling and muddleheaded regulation is often what sustains poverty and this episode of city management is no exception,” according to Nadeem ul Haque.

If I were the Punjab chief minister, I would abduct Nadeem ul Haq from Cairo and not let him go till he had re-planned Lahore.

The savaging of Pakistan in newspapers across the United States that was beginning to ebb, gained fresh life with, first the President’s CNN interview to Ms Christian Amanpour (who always reminds me of a younger Begum Nusrat Bhutto) and then story after story from the well-wired Pakistani stringer of the Washington Post. He it was who first named Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, both in his own newspaper in Pakistan and the one that he strings for here, as the man who had passed on nuclear materials and know-how to Libya, Iran and perhaps North Korea for no reason higher than money. He also wrote about Dr Khan’s vast interests in business and real estate holdings. There is a phrase in English which says it all: cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face.

As the storm raged around Pakistan’s alleged nuclear waywardness and the risk such irresponsible conduct posed to the West, I asked one of this town’s leading Pakistan ‘experts’ what the endgame was. “Will Pakistan, if found guilty as charged, be hanged by the neck by the next tree or will it be let off just for the last time with the direst of warnings?” I wanted to know. He did not disagree that this entire ‘nuclear-secrets-sold’ business was part of a well-planned and deftly executed campaign.

How is it possible for every major newspaper in this country to run the same story over and over again? It is unprofessional but it makes perfect sense if the purpose is to bludgeon the country into doing what the big and mighty lords of the world think it should do. “Repeat the medicine till the patient is dead,” could be a good slogan for the Pakistan-bashing that has gone on here for the last several weeks.

The Embassy of Pakistan has maintained a Buddha-like calm while the media war on Pakistan has raged on. Perhaps unlike the rest of us who hang around on the sidelines, the ‘core professionals’ have seen the light, in which case, it would be my earnest request to them to kindly share their wisdom with us unenlightened ones. Not a word has come out of the embassy or any of Pakistan’s paid and duly accredited representatives in any American newspaper on the nuclear issue. Neither am I aware of any of our distinguished diplomats having gone on television or radio to speak in defence of the country that keeps them living in the style to which they have become accustomed.

It is for this reason that what a small group of Pakistanis living in New Jersey has done deserves to be saluted. Syed Asif Alam of the Association of Pakistani Professionals organised a meeting at Columbia University last week to discuss the American media onslaught against Pakistan, to understand what was behind it and to devise ways to deal with it. He gathered a small and committed group of Pakistanis who all came at their own expense. They agreed that the US media should be engaged in a proactive manner. They said the media’s single-track agenda was that ‘Pakistani begins and ends with extremists’.

Recently, Syed Asif Alam along with some friends went to meet the New York Times editorial board to protest the negative manner in which Pakistan was being dealt with. He has also been emailing critical columnists back and forth in an attempt to point out that they are not being fair. Far be it from me to suggest that this is something our diplomatic reps should be doing.

At the Columbia meeting, Moeed Pirzada drew attention to the ‘synchronisation’ and ‘timing’ of stories on both sides of the Atlantic that were designed to establish that Pakistan was a dangerous proliferator. “What is the objective? Who coordinates? What interests influence the media? What economics lies behind such moves? Why do such stories not appear about Israel and India even when major failures take place? Is the market for ideas and information free?” he asked the meeting.

However, I think we should all stop worrying because our esteemed information minister and principal spokesman of the Government of Pakistan, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, arrives on these shores soon and who can doubt his troubleshooting abilities!

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

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