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It was the summer of 1976, the year of the Quaid-e-Azam’s centenary. I was in London working in what then was the embassy of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto having left the Commonwealth four years earlier, to express Pakistan’s resentment at the partisan role played by the British in the country’s dismemberment in 1971.

Mumtaz Muhammad Khan Daultana was ambassador, and he personally saw to it that the centenary was celebrated across Britain. From 1942 on he had worked with the Quaid closely. He once told a symposium at the Pakistan Society that “the significance of people like me being that we were young, and he always relied upon the young”. When Daultana was at Oxford in 1933-34, he used to often visit the Quaid, then in self-imposed exile in Hampstead. In an interview for the BBC Athar Ali asked him about the Quaid’s state of mind in those days. “I found no signs of despair in him,” Daultana replied. “He did feel, however, that given the leadership of the Muslims as it was at the time, he would not be able to achieve what he believed was to be the destiny of his people.”

Daultana said, “The Quaid had no personal pride or lust for power. He could not even think in those terms. To say that he was not prepared to work under others is wrong. He was even prepared to work under his junior colleagues. He never in his whole life indulged in political intrigue or underhand methods.” He said the Quaid was not the kind of man who would have “donned the local garb merely to win cheap popularity” – something our PM-in-waiting may wish to consider. “He wanted to be accepted by the people as he was… and this is what happened. He was accepted because of his character and his political vision,” Daultana said.

A former Punjab police IG, who can’t seem to keep his monstrous thoughts to himself, recently wrote that if Shaukat Aziz were returned by a Hindu-majority constituency, he would be unacceptable. Let him read what HV Hodson revealed at that same Pakistan Society symposium. “To me a government of Pakistan without a Hindu member and a Sikh member is inconceivable,” the Quaid had told Hodson. Let those who announce constitutional amendments through executive decree with a picture of the Quaid hanging behind pay heed to something else Hodson said. “He (Quaid) was very much a constitutionalist through and through in the sense of being attached passionately, deeper down, right the way through his being, right the way through his career to a constitutional process … He was also a stickler for constitutional nicety and a passionate believer in constitutional rights and the supremacy of the law.”

Daultana once remarked that those who say the Quaid was not a “good Muslim” do him injustice, because he was “incapable of deviating from the path of virtue”. He recalled the Quaid, who had a wonderful sense of humour, telling him in London, after quoting Urdu and Persian verses, “Is it not amazing that no nation, no community of nations has written so much in praise of wine as the Muslims to whom it is forbidden? Whether they are Iranians, or Turks or Indians, nobody has praised wine so much as those who do not drink wine, and yet it cannot be that they praise wine because it is forbidden. None of us has ever eaten pork. It is forbidden too, but every Muslim feels a total revulsion to the taking of pork. You know, if they brought pork before me, I would faint, I can never touch it.”

On another occasion, Daultana said, “Mr Jinnah was a political leader of the Muslims in India; he was not a reformer of the Muslim faith. He was not a saint, he was not a mahatma. He did not set out to bring new light to us, nor guide us in or to a spiritual life. Confusion is sometimes created by falsely assuming that the aim of Mr Jinnah was to create a religious or theocratic state. A man less capable of thinking along those lines could not be imagined … He was a man of the deepest integrity, of the utmost devotion to his ideas, of relentless commitment to what he considered to be the truth. Utterly fearless, a person who was incorruptible, who could not be seduced either by the vulgar lusts of money or temptations of honour and leadership, he set himself an idea and a goal and he pursued it with the last ounce of blood in his body and brought it to ultimate success.”

The only time Earl Mountbatten addressed a Pakistani gathering was the one organised to honour the Quaid at the Lincoln’s Inn on February 15, 1977. Also present was the Master of Rolls, Lord Denning. Mountbatten called the Quaid “one of the very great men of the world whom I had the privilege of knowing”. At their first meeting, Mountbatten invited the Quaid to talk about himself so that they could get to know each other better. The reply was vintage Jinnah. “You are wasting time. I have come here to negotiate.” They met three times a week, Mountbatten recalled: “Mr Jinnah was friendly but ever so correct. He was absolutely set on Pakistan. He had the most indomitable will power. He never wavered to say ‘no’ to any proposition other than partition and a separate Pakistan. We could not but respect the clean-cut way in which he stuck to his point of view – partition and Pakistan.” Once Gandhi suggested that Mountbatten offer Jinnah the prime ministership of united India. Mountbatten asked Gandhi to first sell the idea to Congress. Gandhi tried and failed; even the Sikhs objected. But even if both Congress and Sikhs had agreed, the Quaid would have said no. Mountbatten said it was he who had asked Gandhi to go on a fast unto death so that India would transfer Pakistan’s share of sterling balances.

Mountbatten told the meeting that when he came to Karachi for Pakistan’s independence celebrations, he was given an intelligence report which said that there was a plot to assassinate the Quaid as he drove in an open car through the streets. When Mountbatten told the Quaid, he replied, “It is my honour that is at stake. The drive has been announced. I can’t go back on it. I will drive, but you must not come with me.” Mountbatten insisted that he would. After their safe return to Government House, the Quaid said to the viceroy, “Thank God, I have brought you back alive.” Gen Musharraf who is said to be heavily fortified these days might perhaps take heart from this story, since he is always invoking the Quaid’s name in other contexts.

Mountbatten also made a most startling disclosure. He said that when he was taking his leave of Mr Jinnah, the Quaid said to him, “I want to thank you on behalf of the people of Pakistan for their independence. I can tell you until you arrived on the scene, there wasn’t the remotest possibility of Pakistan ever being brought about… Don’t be surprised or hurt if the Pakistan press make you a scapegoat for all the birth pains we are going to go through. In the long run, the historians will know what exactly you did for Pakistan and they will give you the credit for it, for its creation and its early support after birth. But I am afraid you will have to be content now with the thanks I give you on behalf of my nation and myself.”

Mountbatten told the meeting, “I never forgot this final act of friendship and that has given me the strength not to pay any attention whatsoever to the ill-informed criticism, practically all based on entire untruths, that has appeared in the press, because I know that Mr Jinnah foresaw its coming and said to me that this was how it might be and that I should understand. And I always have.”

I would invite my friend Ardeshir Cowasjee to take it up from here.

As a rule, former civil servants in Pakistan either do not write books or when they do, they write bad books. There are always exceptions, of course, such as former ambassador Sultan Mohammad Khan’s admirable autobiography and Hassan Zaheer’s seminal work on the secession of East Pakistan.

Police officers, barring such distinguished exceptions as the late AB Awan whose book on Balochistan remains perhaps the best work on the subject after independence, have brought little honour either to their service or to themselves by writing the kind of fictionalised fact that master minder of Pakistan’s “ideology” Chaudhry Sardar Mohammad “Pulsia” has inflicted on us in recent years. That being so, I am happy to see the just published book by former police officer Hassan Abbas, a resident of Harvard at present.

His book — Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and America’s War on Terror — though more populist in tone than academic, does contain a good deal of new and startling information. He writes that Nawaz Sharif was not aware of the Kargil Operation when he received Vajpayee in Lahore. He describes how the Kargil operation was planned and executed by the “Gang of Four”, quoting in his support Dr Maleeha Lodhi who said, “Even corps commanders and other service chiefs were excluded from the decision-making process.”

According to him, Gen Tauqir Zia (he of the cricket disaster fame), who was head of military operations at GHQ, was not told (which may have been just as well). When the Kargil plan (it is an old army hobby horse) was presented to Gen Zia-ul-Haq, he summed it up by observing, “So in other words, you have prepared a plan to lead us into a full-scale war with India!” However, when the plan was shown to Nawaz Sharif after the Vajpayee visit, he cleared it, despite reservations expressed by his defence secretary, retired Maj-Gen Iftikhar Ali Khan and former Lt-Gen Majid Malik, a senior member of the Sharif cabinet. It is not clear if the Prime Minister was assured that only Kashmiri “mujahideen” would be involved, not the regular army.

India, writes Abbas, was taken by surprise by Kargil. Those who had always argued that Pakistan was unreliable and perfidious felt triumphant. The reaction to Kargil within the Pakistan army was serious. According to the author, “Maj-Gen Javed Hassan, the commander on the spot, was being threatened by words and gestures of subordinates that could only be described as mutinous. Lt-Gen Mahmood, on whom reality started to dawn fatefully late in the day, saw his adequate jaw falling at an alarming rate. And though the conviction and inner reserves of Lt-Gen Aziz, helped by blissful ignorance, kept him as gung-ho as ever and also helped keep Musharraf’s optimism afloat, the Prime Minister had become a case stricken by fright.

“Under these circumstance, Nawaz was left to plead desperately for a meeting with President Clinton, who found that his schedule allowed him a few free hours on July 4, 1999.”

He writes, “The evacuation of Kargil was followed by a hum of resentment all over Pakistan. The loved ones of those who had given their lives on the desolate and remote slopes there wanted to know that if unilateral withdrawal was to be the end of the whole exercise, what the point was of sacrificing the lives of their sons and brothers? The people of Pakistan had been subjected to the largest whispering campaign in history to expect a great victory.

“When the operation fizzled out like a wet firecracker, they were a nation left speechless in anger and disbelief. Musharraf and the planners could not give any excuses in public, but privately they let it be known that the blame for the scuttling of a brilliant operation lay on a panic-prone Prime Minister, who could not stand up to the US president. Nawaz Sharif, too, could not say anything in his defence publicly, but privately he let it be known that his generals had taken him for a ride, and that he had to bend over backward to get the US President to help Pakistan out of a very sticky situation.”

In his recent interview to India Today, Nawaz Sharif said, “Mr Musharraf felt we should bring Mr Clinton into the matter. He pushed me to meet him. Mr Musharraf said, “Why don’t you meet Clinton? Why don’t you ask him to bring about a settlement?’ It was Mr Musharraf who behaved irresponsibly and it was he who planned the whole affair.”

Isn’t it time we heard from “Mr” Musharraf?

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

After reading A Hamid’s first story, Saadat Hasan Manto said in his sharpshooter style, “What rubbish! One look at an electricity pylon, and A Hamid goes all romantic.” The year was 1948. A Hamid has since written millions of words – travelogues, novels, short stories, children’s books, detective fiction and more. And what Manto said fifty-five years ago, remains true today. A Hamid is our only consistently romantic writer.

His two collections of reminiscences of Lahore in the early years of independence are to be treasured because there is little of that kind of writing in our literature. He writes about the city and he writes about his friends and those he came across in a long career devoted to writing, both serious and journalistic. To have lived by what you write is in itself remarkable in a society where writers receive little respect, and even less money.

The two books, Lahore ki yaadain and Chand chehrey, are like periscopes through which we can relive earlier times and catch a glimpse of the men who made the city what it was. That Lahore is no longer around, though some of its old denizens are, such as A Hamid himself, Intizar Husain, Ashfaq Ahmed, Munir Niazi and Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi. But sadly, far too many of them are gone, Ahmed Rahi and Abdulla Malik being the most recent losses. But they all live on in A Hamid’s world and we are in his debt for allowing us in.

The Pak Tea House, which survives despite its owners’ best efforts to close it, was the gathering place of Lahore’s writers and artists, as was Zelin’s Coffee House and Cheney’s Lunch Home across the road. The last two were boarded up many years ago.

Books never made anyone in Pakistan rich – except the racketeers who produce textbooks – so the one means of sustenance for Lahore’s writers was Radio Pakistan. It didn’t pay much for scripts but it paid better than anyone else. Nasir Kazmi, who worked in radio, loved to walk the streets of Lahore late into the night with Intizar Husain and, when Intizar went home, with A Hamid. After the tea places on the Mall shut down for the night, these two distracted young men would walk all the way to the railway station where the tea stalls remained open all night. Until the middle 1960s, Lahore roads did not have much traffic, and it dwindled to almost nothing at night.

A Hamid remembers Akhlaq Ahmed Delhavi, whose unforgettable voice will remain forever associated with the Lahore station of Radio Pakistan. He always wore a solar hat, even at night (against moon-stroke, he would say). He was too polite not to shake a hand that had been offered to him, but always said later, “God knows who invented this annoying practice!” It was his theory that handshakes transferred germs. He loved Lahore but was once sent to Karachi from where he wrote to a friend, “Karachi! Bad water, bad air, bad climate. Yes there is a breeze but it always comes from the wrong direction. Water is rare and when found turns out to be bitter, which is why they have a Khara Dar but no Meetha Dar.” He bought a cycle once and it remained his sole means of transport till he retired. Whenever he rode a tonga or a rickshaw he paid the driver more than he had asked for. When the driver looked puzzled, he’d say, “It was quite far so what you asked for doesn’t seem enough.”

A Hamid takes us to the Coffee House and we see Maulana Charagh Hasan Hasrat surrounded by friends, waiting to be served. Someone asked, “Maulana, is that white-bearded waiter the one who took your order?” “His beard was black when I placed the order,” replied Maulana.

Roads, writes A Hamid, change and become unrecognisable, as Lahore’s Davis Road has become. “Those who remember it as it once was will recall the brick footpaths that lay on both of its sides. In those days, there was very little traffic on it. It was a long and silent road. There were not many cars in Lahore then. In winter, on a clear day, with white pigeons flying in droves in the blue sky, Davis Road would shimmer in the sun, assuming a strange air of mystery. It remained quiet even during the day, but at night it lay blanketed by a profound and peaceful silence. When I look at this road today I feel that the Davis Road that I knew once lies buried under the noise and pollution… There is so much traffic now that you can stand on one side for an hour and not find an opportunity to cross it safely.” Lahore, he writes, has become a big city but it is no longer a city in which you can walk. The footpaths, where they exist, are parking places. There is commercial pandemonium everywhere. No one seems to know anyone. Everybody is in a rush, running, running, running. A Hamid asks: will the Lahore of those deep and peaceful silences ever come back?

Be it newspapers, makers of soap or broadcasting organisations, it takes a long time for them to establish a distinct image, put a stamp of their own on what they do, but it takes little to knock it all down. Self-destruction is an inexplicable phenomenon. “What is doing well, is best left alone,” may be a sound adage but it is quite amazing how often the contrary gets done, no less by organisations than by individuals. The latest instance of such self-demolition is the venerable Voice of America.

Under the utterly mistaken notion that its worldwide listening audience is more interested in pop, bee bop and hip hop than in good, old-fashioned news, current affairs, discussions and magazine programmes, it has begun to dismantle itself. The current VOA philosophy is simple: if you are below 15 and over 39, get lost. We are not interested in you. Some jokers have sold its governors the utterly ridiculous idea — insofar as the Islamic world goes — that the way to a potential suicide bomber’s heart is through pop music, interspersed with snappy sound bites packaged as news and information.

It took VOA more than 60 years to win universal recognition and admiration for its call signal and it has taken it just months to assume several new and ridiculous identities. Its Persian service is now called Radio Farda, its Arabic service Radio Sawa and its Pakistan service, Radio Aap ki Dunya, if you please. A more irrelevant name could not have been invented. I suggest that the genius who thought it up should be put on a donkey back to front and paraded through the streets of Washington and Islamabad.

VOA is controlled by the federally appointed Broadcasting Board of Governors which has been creating these new media groups at the rate of one every few months. The 500 permanent VOA staffers, as fine a group of professional broadcasters as you can gather under one roof, have been up in arms at the destruction of something they have spent their lifetimes building. A petition submitted to Congress last week said the new autonomous units focused too much on music and entertainment at the expense of hard news and spoken word programmes. They said the Board was “dismantling the nation’s radio beacon piece by piece”.

But let me turn to Pakistan and what the scene is, on air and on ground. Radio Aap ki Dunya is aimed at age group 15 to 39. God alone knows on what research the decision to launch this pop-goes-the-weasel service is based, but who told these worthies that people in this age group remain awake from 7 pm to 7 am, the hours Dunya is on the air. It is Pakistani pop and Indian pop and itsy bitsy news in between. How many times can even the admirers of her looks and voice listen to Hadiqa Kiyani for instance? And how will Miss Kiyani’s music help the “war on terrorism” and fight radical Islam? Will it get the Americans Osama bin Laden?

On July 9 at a special ceremony here, the Board signed a deal with Clarity Communications (Pakistan), known to one and all as a proxy much favoured by the indestructible federal Information Secretary. Clarity will broadcast Dunya programmes during the day on FM101 on leased time segments. FM101 is owned by Radio Pakistan. The honest and logical thing would have been to sign the deal direct with Radio Pakistan. That the Information Ministry did not favour. It was discreetly suggested to the VOA Board that business could only be done with Clarity. The strangest part of this entire charade is that neither the Board nor Clarity is willing to disclose what the financial basis of the deal is. The buzz in Washington is that Clarity is going to be paid two million dollars. For what? For broadcasting its and bits of Dunya from FM101’s eight city stations, none of which has a range of more than 12-15 miles. Eighty-five percent of Pakistan’s population that lives in rural areas will not be able to listen to these programmes. Even in large cities like Lahore and Karachi, there will be areas where the FM101 signal will not reach.

If ever there was a “sweetheart deal” this is it. Radio Aap ki Dunya will not only be supplying the programmes but also paying FM101 for broadcasting them in limited time slots during daylight hours.

Why does nobody ever make such a proposition to me? And I live in Washington.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Between 1951 and 1954 Saadat Hasan Manto wrote nine letters to Uncle Sam. Despite their tongue-in-cheek tone, they tell us a great deal about Manto. For example he takes several potshots at Pakistani communists whom he always considered unthinking camp followers who had surrendered their own sense of judgment to what they believed was the all-knowing Party pontificating from distant Moscow.

How did these letters come to be written? The first letter dated December 16, 1951, was written at the request of the US consulate in Lahore. In his second letter, this is how Manto describes the process of how they came about:

“It has been a while since I wrote to you but whereas there has been no acknowledgment from you, some days earlier, a gentleman from your embassy whose name I do not recall, dropped in to see me in the company of a young local. A brief résumé of my conversation with these gentlemen follows. We introduced ourselves in English. I was surprised that he spoke English, not American, a language I have been unable to follow my entire life. We spoke for nearly three-quarters of an hour. He was pleased to meet me, as every American is pleased to meet a Pakistani or an Indian. I too gave him the impression that I was pleased to meet him, when the fact is that I do not derive any pleasure from meeting white Americans… I wanted to tell you that the gentleman who came to see me belonged to your consulate here. He wanted me to write a story for him. That threw me because I do not know how to write in English, so I said to him, ‘Sir, I am an Urdu writer. I do not know how to write in English.’ His reply was, ‘We need a story in Urdu because we have a journal that is published in the Urdu language.’ I did not want to probe any further, so I said, ‘I am willing.’ God is my witness, I did not know that he had come to see me at your bidding. Perhaps you made him read the letter I sent you.”

The American, Manto reports, asked what he would need to pay for the story. Manto said Rs 200 which he admits was a lie (he was paid between Rs 20 and Rs 50 for a story by Lahore publishers and editors). The American replied, “Just 200! You should charge at least 500 for a story.” Manto’s reaction was vintage Manto: “Look, sir, it will be 200 and further discussion on this matter I am not prepared for.” The man left, only to reappear the next morning with the money. He insisted that Manto take 300 instead of 200. Manto relented but warned him that what he would write may not be to his visitor’s liking, nor would he permit changes to the text.

We are lucky to have a firsthand account of what happened that day. It comes from Manto’s “young local”, the well-known Lahore journalist Khalid Latif. From here on, it is Khalid’s account, though it is abbreviated in my translation.

“The year was 1951. I had left Nawai Waqt for Afaq and ended up in USIS [United States Information Service]. The United States, in a bid to increase its influence in Pakistan after the refusal by Liaquat Ali Khan to send troops to Korea, had begun to make forays into Pakistan’s political, social and literary circles. An air-conditioned library had been set up on the Mall where entry was free. Attempts were also on hand to produce material in Urdu and Bengali, including articles by Pakistani writers in favour of America. The articles did not have to be a hundred percent for America as long as they were critical of communism and Soviet expansionism.

“US interest in Manto developed after he ridiculed a Soviet disarmament proposal that the left in Pakistan was making much of. The Americans must have thought they could recruit Manto on their side in the Cold War, but had they known the first thing about Manto, they would have stayed away. In the first week of December, a gentleman whose name was probably Smith arrived from Washington to give practical shape to America’s new drive. He asked Kazim Hussain Raz, head of the USIS press section, to arrange for him to meet Saadat Hasan Manto. Raz did not know Manto but I did.

“Mr Smith and I arrived at Laxami Mansion where Manto lived and were welcomed by him and taken inside. After a few minutes, his nephew Hamid Jalal, who was news editor at Radio Pakistan, dropped in. Tea was served while we chatted. Smith told Manto the reason for his visit and requested him to write something for USIS. Manto replied that he was an Urdu writer and did not write in English. Smith said the articles would be published in Urdu and translated, if needed, into English for publication in other countries. Manto said he would only write what he wished to write. Smith replied that he had no problem with that. When it came to the question of money, Smith said the USIS would pay Rs 500 per piece. We were sure this would please Manto, but he refused point-blank, insisting that he would take no more than Rs 200. In the end, a compromise was struck at Rs 300. We drank down our tea and left. Next morning Smith and I reappeared at Laxami Mansion and gave Manto an advance of Rs 300. He said his piece would be on its way soon.

“Smith was thrilled because he had persuaded Pakistan’s greatest writer to write in favour of America. The next day he returned to Washington. A few days later, Manto made a jaunty entry at the USIS and handed me an envelope, which I passed on to Raz without opening it. Before leaving, Manto said that if more articles were required, payment would need to be made in advance. Raz took the envelope to Mr Withus, the senior officer in charge, but when he came out of the boss’s room, he looked distraught. When I asked why, he answered, “Manto has taken us for a ride.” He told me that Manto’s article was a most hilarious letter to Uncle Sam which I asked if it would be sent to a newspaper. “Forget it,” Raz replied, “no chance of that.” Raz had read out Manto’s piece line by line to Withus, translating it into English. Withus was flabbergasted. While we were talking, he emerged from his room, Manto’s article in hand and told Raz to have it translated, which was done the same day and copies sent to Karachi and Washington. Manto dropped in a few days later and asked if he should bring another article. We told him to allow time for the first one to appear. He never asked for money, nor did he inquire about the first article. This second one was another letter to Uncle Sam. The Americans never asked Manto to write again, and he never offered to write anyway.

In his ninth and last letter to Uncle Sam, Manto proposes that AS Bokhari, who had by then become UN’s head of information, should be asked to write ‘Amreeka ka jugrafia’ on the lines of his classic ‘Lahore ka jugrafia’. How one wishes he had done that, because anyone who has not read ‘Lahore ka jugrafia’ from Bokhari’s Patras ke mazameen and who lives in Lahore should be banished to South Waziristan in the hope that an overhead American drone will get him his just deserts.

Asra Nomani, who happens to be a direct descendant of Maulana Shibli Nomani, the celebrated Islamic scholar, lives in a small town in West Virginia. She is also considered a heretic, if not an apostate, by some of the faithful in her town. Her sin? She walked into the town’s single mosque one Friday from the front entrance and took her place with the rest of the congregation. She had come to say her prayers and she did not believe then, nor does she believe now, that Islam prohibits women from praying in the same spot as men.

The imam stopped in mid-sentence as if struck by lightning; every head turned. They couldn’t believe what they saw. “Sister,” the imam said, “there is a separate entrance for women and a separate place for them to pray.” Asra held her ground. “This is the house of God and I am here to pray. I am quite happy sitting where I am.” Many of the men who were close to her moved as if her being there would bar their entrance to heaven. Her defiant gesture caused a commotion in the tiny Muslim community and every means was used to dissuade the young woman from praying in the same spot as men and entering the mosque from the main, men-only entrance. There were also threats of physical violence and declarations that her wayward behaviour had ensured eternal damnation for her. Asra could neither be convinced, nor frightened, nor dissuaded. She continues to go to the mosque because she believes that what they are trying to apply are man-made not divine regulations. She has also written about it and received much support from Muslim women in many countries.

I narrate Asra’s story because what the besieged religion of Islam needs today are more Asras, many more, to challenge the austere hegemony of Mullahism. I should add that her brave example has not been followed by her sisters, though most of them are in agreement with her.

However, there is one mosque in Toledo, Ohio, were men and women pray under the same roof and are only separated by a low divider.

While it is a wonderful affirmation of faith to build a place of worship, the hundreds of mosques that have gone up in the United States and Canada in the last thirty to forty years are for the most part controlled by illiberal Muslims. Since the Saudi government, out of good intentions no doubt, made generous financial contributions to their construction, it has also ensured that only a certain interpretation of Islam will mark the thinking and discourse of those who lead the congregations or manage their affairs. I have run into more illiberal and radical Muslims in North America than I would meet in Multan, were I to spend an entire week seeking them out. What is their problem? Why have they chosen to isolate themselves as if the entire world was at war with them? Why are they blind to the romance and sweep of Islam and the liberation it once brought to humanity? Why do they express such contempt for the societies where they have chosen to live and none of whose benefits will they even dream of denying themselves?

A couple of weeks ago in London I met a young man, English-born and English-bred. He had a long black beard — no moustache — and he was wearing a white skullcap, a long white shirt and pyjamas that hung above his ankles, complemented by a bag swinging from his shoulder. He told me that it was the destiny of Muslims to be victorious over the “Kuffar” or the infidels. When I asked him whom he had in mind, he replied, “The Jews and the Christians.” “But the Quran calls them people of the book,” I remonstrated. “The Muslims alone are the people of the book and all earlier books stand annulled and incorporated in the Quran, the final word of God,” he declared. I pointed out that right now it did not look as if Muslims were going to be the victors. “Not in this world, but the next,” he thundered. “What about this world then, here and now?” I asked. “This world does not matter. It is nothing. We are going to be the victors in the next world,” he declared. At that point, I decided our conversation was going nowhere.

It is time, therefore, to throw open the windows, to take on the dark-souled, ill-read and delusionary arbiters of the word of God and to assert the supremacy of love and reason. It also seems to me that what the Muslims living in Western countries need is not a chicken in every pot, but an Asra Nomani in every mosque.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Anyone who cares about writing well and clearly in English need look no farther than George Orwell’s classic 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English language’. When I first read it many years ago, it was as if a window had suddenly been thrown open in a room crawling with cumbersome adjectives, pretentious metaphors, clause-infested sentences and dead words and ideas stringed together to read like prose. Since that day, it has been like an article of faith with me that there is no better primer for those who want to write simple, straight and clear English than that brilliantly written essay of just over 5,000 words.

Orwell is the master I have always looked up to and I am glad to be joined at his feet by TFT’s Ejaz Haider who, the other day, circulated Orwell’s masterpiece to his contributors with the following note. “Most of you must have read this essay. But it’s always good to re-read it; indeed, for those of us who pretend to be writers, this should be compulsory reading before and after writing every article. Every time I read it, I feel like trashing everything I have written so far.”

We write English like a dead language. My friend M Rafiq who writes impeccably says most Pakistani writing sounds like English but isn’t. Every piece of Pakistani writing reads like every other piece. He once said, “Like the houses and interior décor one runs into in Pakistan, it is a pile of bricks, a jumble of words, bleak and empty, with no design and no soul.” Over the years, strangely enough, though the use of English in Pakistan has increased dramatically, its quality has gone down. Leave alone Orwell-like writing, much of what appears in print is embarrassingly full of grammatical mistakes and clichés.

Before I move to what Orwell wrote, it seems to me that if the use of English is to continue in Pakistan, the entire nation, barring exceptions of course, would need a crash course in simple grammar and usage. Pick up anything written, said or printed in English, from Supreme and High Court judgements (Justice Cornelius, alas, is dead) to news reports, PTV and Radio Pakistan English newscasts, college convocation addresses, books in print or job applications and you will find them to be full of errors. It is scandalous; there is no excuse for it.

Orwell observes that what we write becomes “ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts”.

He quotes five passages of bad English, in all of which he finds two common qualities: stale imagery and lack of precision. He compares stale and vague phrases tacked together to the sections of a prefabricated house. He gives a list of “dying metaphors”, such as “iron resolution” and “a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves”. The examples he provides include such Pakistani perennials as: take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters and Achilles’ heel. Most people who use them do not always know their meaning or clearly are not interested in what they are saying. He decries the practice of eliminating simple verbs and turning them into a phrases made up of a noun or an adjective. He also advises that one should use the active instead of the passive voice and gerunds instead of noun constructions (‘by examining’ and not ‘by an examination of’). He dislikes the use of phrases such as ‘with respect to’ and recommends simple conjunctions and prepositions.

Orwell has nothing but disdain for pretentious diction used to dress up a simple statements. He observes that writing that glorifies war takes on an archaic colour (see US press coverage of the Iraq war). He is also against the use of foreign phrases, including Greek and Latin words. He has no patience with the sort of meaningless language used by art and literary critics. Orwell takes a passage from the Bible and “translates” it into modern English of the worst sort. Here is his passage from Ecclesiastes: “I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” Orwell’s “translation” (which contains every single Pakistani sin against the English language): runs: “Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”

Orwell’s message can be reduced to two words: write simply. Instead of saying, “In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that” one should simply say, “I think.” According to him, “By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.” He lays down six questions that every writer should ask himself. They are: “What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?”

I have been barely able to do justice to all that Orwell wrote but here are a few rules he frames for writing good, clear, clean, honest prose: “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Never use the passive where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”

I have no illusion, however, that there are many in our country who care about Orwell or good English or, for that matter, good Urdu.

It is ironic how small is the number of those in Pakistan have read the Hamoodur Rehman Commission Report of Inquiry into the 1971 War. It is ironic because for nearly thirty years there was such public clamour for its release. After that happened, thanks to Gen. Musharraf, the full text was obtained by Vanguard and published, but the last time I inquired, a large number of copies were still unsold. It is a fair and impartial document and a tribute to its authors who produced it in about six months. Appointed by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto just six days after assuming power, the Commission held 57 sittings, in the course of which it examined 213 witnesses who included serving and retired military and civil officials, members of the public, including some journalists, and several others.

After the POWs came back from India, the Commission examined some of them, including Gen. “Tiger” Niazi and Rao Farman Ali. A supplementary report was thereafter prepared which forms part of the Vanguard book. It is essential that the Report be widely read so that fantasy can be separated from fact and responsibility for the man-made tragedy of 1971 clearly fixed. Some of the principles have since gone to the infinite jurisdiction of the Almighty, but those others who remain on earth must be made to answer for their actions. As for the Pakistani nation, it will not have purged its soul until it admits its complicity in the rape of East Pakistan. It is long past time when we should have asked the people of what was once East Pakistan to forgive us for our silence during the terrible spring and summer of 1971, because those who do not come to terms with their past cannot have a future.

It is a meticulously written report and it must be read from start to finish to gain authentic, first-hand understanding of the events of 1971. However, some of its findings can be shared in this brief column in the hope that they will induce some to go to the full text. The first thing to understand is that Gen. Yahya Khan at no point had any intention of transferring power to an elected government, any elected government. The Commission’s conclusion on this point is enlightening. “The manner in which he took power … the procrastinating steps he took towards summoning the National Assembly, the manner in which he collected and utilised funds for political purposes to negotiate with various parties and finally his future scheme of things as reflected in his draft constitution, have left us with no manner of doubt that the General imposed Martial Law with the object only to personally seizing and retaining power.”

On 7 January 1971, Yahya and Sheikh Mujibur Rehman met in Dhaka. After presenting his Six Point programme, Mujib asked Yahya what his objections were. Yahya replied that he had no objections but would Mujib be able to carry West Pakistani leaders with him? Mujib replied, “Of course” and asked that the Assembly be summoned on 15 February. When Governor Ahsan said that with an absolute majority, the Awami League could bulldoze its constitution through without bothering about West Pakistan’s interests, Mujib said, “No, I am a democrat and the majority leader of all Pakistan. I cannot ignore the interests of West Pakistan. I am not only responsible to the people of East and West Pakistan but also to world opinion. I shall do everything on democratic principles.” The Mujib-Bhutto meeting did not bring the two any closer. According to the Commission, Bhutto’s attitude is best summed up in his statement of 19 February, “We have gone a mile to accommodate the Six Points. We request our East Pakistani friends to move at least an inch to accommodate our point of view.” Bhutto wanted more time to negotiate with Mujib or he wanted the 120-day limit Yahya had placed on the Assembly to produce a constitution removed. Had Yahya been sincere, he would have freed the Assembly of what in fact was a hanging sword over its head.

It is a pity that none of the recommendations of the Report has been implemented. None of the individuals against whom action was proposed has been proceeded against. For instance, Maj. Gen. Muhammad Umar, who is occasionally seen on TV advising the nation where to go is said by the Commission to have been in a “category of his own” as “he held large sums of cash, which were certainly no part of the official budget of his department and the source of which has not been sufficiently explained to us.” This money, everyone knew at the time, was used for political backhanders. The Commission recommended that Maj. Gen. Rahim Khan be proceeded against for abandoning his troops in East Pakistan and for escaping to West Pakistan. However, not only was he made CGS on return but later defence secretary and PIA chairman as well. He is spending a happy retired life in Islamabad, as are several others of his ilk.

Also thrown overboard was the Commission’s recommendation that a “high-powered court or commission of inquiry should be set up to investigate into the allegations of alleged atrocities and wanton cruel and immoral behaviour attributed to the Pakistan army during and after the army action in East Pakistan.” Right-wing parties have held Bhutto almost solely responsible for 1971. This is illogical, since it was Yahya and not he who was the decisionmaker. The Commission also rejects this charge. However, Bhutto is blamed for “displaying lack of political foresight by failing to make proper assessment of the intensity of the reaction likely to be created in East Pakistan” to the postponement of the Assembly. He told the Commission that he did not expect the reaction to be so violent. “If Sheikh Mujibur Rehman was uncompromising in his attitude, the leader of the Peoples Party was equally adamant,” the Report observes.

On the killing of East Pakistani intellectuals on the eve of surrender, the Commission states, “Unless the Bangaldesh authorities can produce some convincing evidence, it is not possible to record a finding that any intellectuals or professionals were indeed arrested and killed by the Pakistan army during Dec. 1971.” Bangladesh has maintained that the Pakistan army killed three million and raped 200,000 women. The Report finds these figures “highly exaggerated”, arguing that “so much damage could not have been caused by the entire strength of the Pakistan army then stationed in East Pakistan, even if it had nothing else to do.” “It is, therefore, clear that the figures mentioned by Dacca authorities are altogether fantastic and fanciful,” the Report states. The GHQ told the Commission in an official communication that during the army action, 26,000 people were killed. Even one innocent life taken is one too many, and 26,000 is a very large number. As for the rapes, the Commission observes, “The falsity of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman’s repeated allegation that the Pakistani troops had raped 200,000 Bengali girls in 1971 was borne out when the abortion team he had commissioned from Britain in early 1972 found that its workload involved the termination of only a hundred or more pregnancies.”

The killings of West Pakistanis and Biharis were carried out in at least 26 places, including Dhaka and Chittagong. “Harrowing tales of these atrocities were narrated” by those who escaped, says the Report, adding, “For days on end, all through the troubled month of March 1971, swarms of terrorised non-Bengalis lay at the army-controlled Dacca airport awaiting their turn to be taken to the safety of West Pakistan. Families of West Pakistani officers and other ranks serving with East Bengal units were subjected to inhuman treatment, and a large number of West Pakistani officers were butchered by their erstwhile Bengali colleagues.”

Be that as it may, what happened in 1971 should ultimately be seen through the eyes, not of commissions and committees, but those of Faiz Ahmed Faiz who wrote: Kab nazar mein aaye gi be-daagh sabzay ki bahar: Khoon ke dhabbay duullain gai kitni barsatoon ke baad (When again will the eye behold splendour in the grass: How many seasons of rain will it take for the blood to be washed off its face?).

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