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It is always nice to see pollsters fall flat on their faces at election time. The art of electoral divination is a chancy one and many a reputation has been lost in the bid to predict what is actually unpredictable. Most polls and surveys about elections turn out to have been off the mark and yet these crystal ball gazers stay in business and much as frogs do at monsoon time, they re-emerge come the next election.

The pollsters got the 1970 elections in Pakistan wrong, being quite sure that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s party will pick up a couple of dozen seats, no more. They were again wrong about Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif’s victories. The last election in India left a lot of egg on a lot of faces in India. No pollster made a forecast about Gen Pervez Musharraf’s referendum, thus missing that one opportunity to be proved right.

And that brings us to the election here two days after this appears in print. First, the pundits said that Kerry’s campaign was a non-starter, then they said his campaign had begun to gather some momentum and after the debates the word was that though Kerry had outshone Bush, the race was too close to call. However, they kept giving Bush a two to three percent edge over Kerry.

Dr Manzur Ejaz, who is one Pakistani who has actively worked for the Democratic Party for over fifteen years in the Virginia area, is neither a pollster, nor a soothsayer, nor does he wear an amulet. His word, therefore, should be taken without a pinch of salt. He has been saying from day one that John Kerry is going to win by a landslide. The race, he insists, is not close. Although the powerful right-wing media establishment keeps charging that the media is controlled by liberals, the fact is that it is not. If Kerry wins, he will have won in spite of the right-wing media, made up of talk radio, cable TV channels such as Fox, the evangelists and reborn Christians — of which the President is one — and the neo-con brigade that infests the halls of government.

This is also the first time Muslim-Americans, whose number is no smaller than that of American Jews, if not larger, have involved themselves in a presidential election. And this despite their leadership — much of it made up either of fortune-hunters and upwardly mobile snobs or orthodox types who remain embedded in the past, while paying little attention to the present. Since the attacks of 9/11, Muslim-Americans have been at the receiving end of Homeland Security and FBI’s attentions. While one ought not to get paranoid, the fact is that Muslims are viewed with a good deal of suspicion. At airports, a Muslim or someone who bears “Middle Eastern looks” is more likely to be questioned closely and gone over with some thoroughness than a person who does not fall into that category. People have been picked up in the middle of the night from their homes on the vaguest of suspicions. There have been deportations and thousands have seen the inside of jails for the first time for the most flimsy reasons. The Pakistan embassy has been most “cooperative” and actually brags about the planeloads it helps get deported to Pakistan. I have myself experienced “special attention” every time I have arrived from abroad. More than once, I have been subjected to the same treatment while travelling domestically. Why? Wrong looks, wrong name. A name like John Smith would have been far less troublesome.

People associate all this unpleasantness with Bush. His invasion of Iraq, on the flimsiest of excuses, has triggered mayhem, with thousands of innocent Iraqis (no number has ever been officially given) and Americans dead. The irony is that in a bid to make the world a safer place, Bush has ended up making it extremely unsafe. His lopsided Palestine policy has earned him no friends among Muslims. For the first time, they have, therefore, decided to get organised and to vote him out of office. They don’t love Kerry, who has paid no attention to them whatever, but they do hate Bush. The pollsters can say what they like: the fact is that thousands of Muslims have got themselves registered as voters and they are all going to go out on Tuesday, November 2 and vote against Bush. The only Pakistani or Muslim I know in the Washington area who is voting for Bush is my friend Hanif Akhtar. He has been placed on some advisory board or other by this administration. So with him, it is a debt of honour. As for the rest, Bush is a big no, no, no.

An Indian journalist has just phoned to say that one leading astrologer in India and two in this country have predicted a Kerry victory. If they turn out to be right, I might ask them a question or two about Pakistan where Bye Bye Bush will not exactly lead to celebrations in a certain quarter of the city of Rawalpindi.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

There was a Kashmir conference in Washington in September. One really has to wonder what good these conferences do because those who take decisions on behalf of the Indian and Pakistani states do not give a row of pins about what is said at these gatherings. Perhaps the Indian government is slightly more sensitive to non-official thinking, but what I know and have experienced of the government of Pakistan leads me to believe that it doesn’t give two hoots about what academics, journalists and even former officials think.

Since everyone is talking about Kashmir, Gen Musharraf and Sardar Manmohan Singh down, it is time to face a few home truths. While India’s despicable Kashmir policy is there for the world to see, it is only fair to examine what Pakistan’s policy towards the part of the state called Azad Jammu and Kashmir has been. All other things Azad Kashmir may be, but “Azad” it is not, never has been, and, by all indications, never will be. In the early days of Pakistan, it was the notorious Ministry of Kashmir Affairs that administered Azad Kashmir. The ministry was headed by an officer of the rank of joint secretary. The president of Azad Kashmir took his orders from this bureaucrat or one of his juniors.

To this day, the two key officials in Azad Kashmir, the chief secretary and the inspector-general of police, are “lent officers” from Pakistan. Once they get posted to Azad Kashmir, they are raised several notches in pay and status. 57 years have passed since the establishment of Azad Kashmir but the locals still can’t be trusted with positions of high responsibility. Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, some which we know and others we don’t, have a heavy and intrusive presence in Azad Kashmir. Much of the executive authority, to which he has no constitutional or legal claim, is exercised not by the elected prime minister but by the president, who on retirement from the Pakistan army was imposed on Azad Kashmir. He is to the AK prime minister what Gen Musharraf is to his.

Assuming for the sake of argument that India were to agree to accept the UN resolutions on Kashmir, would Pakistan do the same? Will it be prepared to pull out its troops from the territory? Will it agree to the expulsion, if not extirpation, of the groups that continue to operate with the permission or connivance of Pakistani agencies across the Line of Control? Will it agree to the plebiscite it demands in a state only 64 percent of whose population is Muslim, 33 percent being Hindu and three percent being Buddhist? Will Pakistan be prepared to accept that the Northern Areas are an integral part of Kashmir, which they are? Elections to the so-called Northern Areas Legislative Council are due on October 12. Those elected will have neither the authority to prepare the budget, nor elect the leader of the house. The Chief Executive for the Northern Areas is appointed by Islamabad. The people of the area do not elect him, yet he is their supreme ruler. The 1999 judgment of the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Supreme Court declaring the Northern Areas to be an integral part of Azad Kashmir remains unimplemented.

While the UN resolutions offer only two choices – India or Pakistan – how will Pakistan react if the people of the state wish to join neither? The great tragedy of Kashmir is that the people, whose rights both governments proclaim, have not been associated with any of the decisions that affect their fate. No Kashmiri was involved in the decision-making process as the two governments wrestled each other at the United Nations, nor was there anyone representing the Kashmiris in 1962 at the Bhutto-Swarn Singh talks, or at Tashkent in 1966 or at Simla in 1972.

In the last fifteen years many attempts have been made by Kashmiri politicians from both sides to meet but without success, as such direct interaction is as unacceptable in New Delhi as in Islamabad. Whereas India can take shelter behind the legal fiction that Kashmir is an integral part of the Indian Union, Pakistan has no such legal shelter because it officially maintains that the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir is a disputed territory and its future dispensation remains to be decided by its people.

India’s record in Kashmir is abysmal. One day, its people will have to ask themselves in what way their intransigence has brought any glory to them or their nation. Kashmir will remain a bleeding wound for India as long as it is unresolved. India has lost tremendous international goodwill because of its repression in Kashmir and its refusal to admit that the problem needs to be resolved so that the people of South Asia can get on with their lives. The argument that Kashmir must remain an inseparable part of India for the sake of Indian unity was best answered by Jayaprakash Narayan, who said, “Few things have been said (that are) more silly than this one. The assumption behind the argument is that the states of India are held together by force and not by a sentiment of a common nationality. It is an assumption that makes a mockery of the Indian nation and a tyrant of the Indian state.”

M Yusuf Buch, the greatest living expert on Kashmir, once wrote, “Contrary to the impression that has been created by the defenders of the status quo in Kashmir, it is the non-settlement of the Kashmir dispute, rather than its settlement, that threatens the territorial integrity of India, and it may be added, of Pakistan. A just and fair settlement of the dispute, in whatever form, would give to each country a mutually recognised and secure frontier and thus encourage their respect for each other’s territorial integrity.”

He also dealt with that other stock Indian argument that the retention of Kashmir is essential for the survival of Indian secularism and for the safety and well-being of India’s 150 million Muslims. “How can the security of Indian Muslims be made dependent on the occupation of Kashmir by force. Secularism should be a function of India’s own history, the composition of its population, its diversified cultural heritage, as well as its international contacts…. How can the captivity of less than five percent of India’s Muslims in a defined area assure the safety of the remaining 95 percent scattered all over the country?”

Kashmir is the Jesus Christ of nations. The suffering and sacrifices of its people go back hundreds of years, while the modern era of their persecution dawned on a lovely summer morning in Srinagar in July 1931 when 21 of them were gunned down by the maharaja’s police. Those who have laid these tremendous sacrifices to waste are in the dock today.

Pakistanis complain, and rightly so, of their ill treatment on arrival at US airports. They are starting at the wrong end, in my view. They should first complain against their treatment by Western, especially American and Canadian, embassies back home in Pakistan.

Anyone applying for a visa immediately comes under suspicion. Unless he can prove otherwise, to the consular officials, the applicant is undertaking the trip with the intention of never ever coming back. He can give any number of reasons to allay their apprehensions, but the finger of suspicion remains pointed at him. They wonder if he is bank-worthy or if he is cheating, being in cahoots with his bank manager who has signed for him a statement that shows him to be financially sound, when he is not? Could he be smuggling drugs?

Is he a crypto-terrorist (one used to come under suspicion as a communist manqué during the Cold War) and a secret worshipper of Osama bin Laden? Is he likely to blow up the San Francisco bridge or perhaps the United Nations headquarters itself (in the latter case the present administration should actually give him a VIP visa)? I am not sure how many of the applicants are refused a visa by the US embassy in Islamabad, but the number has to be very large. The hefty fee paid when making an application is, of course, not refundable. Such fees now constitute a major source of earning for Western embassies in Islamabad.

I know that my late cousin Dr Abdul Rashid, a retired and much-respected colonel in the Army Medical Corps, who was well into his seventies, was refused a US visa he had sought for visiting his daughter, a US citizen, married and long settled in this country. He was heartbroken. He died not long after. My own sister Sorayya, wife of KH Khurshid, who wanted to travel to Canada to see her only son was refused a visa the first time she applied at the Canadian embassy on the ground that she had “no roots in Pakistan”. She was advised by a friend to apply again. She did and this time she got it. I wish I could find a more charitable explanation for the first refusal but profit would appear to be the only explanation. Since all visa agreements are mutual, it is only logical and fair that Pakistani missions should accord the same treatment to foreigners that their countries accord to Pakistanis. Will that happen? Yes, but in a week of Sundays.

Last week, the American vicerine for South Asia, Christina Rocca, was in Islamabad. In the next couple of days, she had been received by President Gen Pervez Musharraf, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri, Foreign Secretary Riaz H Khokhar and, I take it, some of the brass from the garrison town of Rawalpindi. Ms Rocca, whose pre-State Department career was entirely intelligence-related, is number four in the pecking order at the State Department. There is one deputy secretary of state, five undersecretaries and a host of assistant secretaries, of whom she is one. According to protocol, she should be received by an official no higher than an Additional Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Self-respect is all that a poor country has and if it loses that then it has nothing left to lose.

The Western embassies in Islamabad, led by the American embassy, have the run of the place. A first secretary is able to gain access to officials three times higher than his level. Acceptance of private diplomatic hospitality used to be strictly controlled by the Foreign Office; but not since Zia ul Haq’s time, when all doors were thrown open and it became common for officials as high as heads of ministries and departments to sup with stripling second and even third secretaries. Zia ul Haq once threw a farewell party for a first secretary of the American embassy. In India, protocol has always been strictly controlled. Ms Rocca, who also makes periodic visits to New Delhi, is received by an additional secretary or, at best, by the foreign secretary. That is her ceiling. The access of US embassy officials to the External Affairs ministry is maintained according to strictly laid-down protocol. Has that affected US-India relations adversely, our open-door decision-makers should ask themselves? The answer is no, not at all. In fact, the more dignity you show, the greater the respect with which you will be treated.

Since everyone is telling Shaukat Aziz what he should do, let me also join that crowd, but all I want to ask him is to restore Pakistan’s dignity when it comes to the Christina Roccas of the world. Let us remain civil but correct. As Zulfikar Ali Bhutto once said, “Pakistan is not a fly on the map of South Asia that can be swatted out.” And I will never forget what he said when I suggested that he kindly find time for the No. 3 man from Newsweek. “I will try”, he replied, “but remember that I am No. 1 here”.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

A friend of mine, Prof MA Qadeer, who, on learning some years ago that Pakistan had won a hard-fought Security Council seat, observed that what Pakistan needs is more public toilets in Lahore, is in the process of completing a social history of Pakistan. He has been collecting material for the book for years and now that he has more time, having recently retired from a Canadian university, he has been able to flesh out his ideas and observations. While the rest of us go for the big stories in our daily newspaper, he looks for items buried on the inside pages that list how many cars were stolen in Karachi in one week, how many police stations were attacked in Sindh, how many banks were held at gunpoint in Lahore, how many murders were committed in Dera Ghazi Khan, how many patwaris were held for bribery, how many teachers were laid off or how many power breakdowns there were in a given month in interior Punjab or Baluchistan. That is what makes up the real Pakistan, he says.

Qadeer has also taken a long and careful look at religion in our social life and how, and in what way, it has affected certain structural and more obvious features of our society. According to him, urban Islam has tilted towards puritanical creeds and ritualistic observances, whereas, in contrast, rural Islam remains open and experiential. Unlike the former, which is mosque and sermon-based, the latter is centred around shrines and mystics. The torchbearers of revivalist Islam remain the urban middle classes, both of the housing society variety and the more homespun bazaar type. The traditional Islamic establishment consisting of mullahs and their disciples make up the militant force of Islam and Islamic street power. Despite the extensive visibility of Islam in the “public space”, the web of daily actions is increasingly driven by non-religious motives. A paradox of symbolic religiosity and secular actions defines everyday life in much of Pakistan.

Qadeer argues that the Islamic revival in Pakistan has a stock set of measures that have been enacted again and again. For example, the ban on alcohol, gambling and obscenity is one such hobbyhorse, a kind of signature policy of all Islamic revivals. Those who call for such bans in 2004 surely must know that exactly one year after independence, a ban on these lines was first imposed. This ban was repeated in 1966, 1977, 1980, 1998 and 2003. Talk of flogging a dead, a very dead horse! None of these bans has ever been rescinded and, thus without any legal need the same law has been enacted and re-enacted.

During Zia-ul-Haq’s eleven years in power, while the spiritual essence of Islam and its universalism and humanism were played down or altogether ignored, outward signs and symbols of piety were promoted to be true Islam. While the military state emphasised ritualistic prayer and fasting during Ramazan, it looked the other way, if not actively encouraged corruption. In fact, the people were allowed a free-for-all in other spheres as long as they did not question the illegality of the order that Zia had imposed on Pakistan. In an attempt to stifle political dissent and maintain the draconian character of his regime, Zia encouraged the clergy and quasi-fascist religious groups to gain legitimacy. Conferences of ‘ ulema ’ and ‘ mashaikh ’ were convened to browbeat the regime’s opponents. What he established and ran was not an “Islamic” but a martial law state, where the rule of law became the will of the local commander. The only face of Islam that the people saw was one that dealt out physical punishment, as if that was all Islam was or that was all Islam had brought to the world. Zia is long gone, but to this day Pakistan has not been able to get rid of the so-called Islamic laws that he brought in. No leader after him has had the courage or the time to bring down the structure of hypocrisy that he built during his years in power.

Qadeer shows that many “Islamic” measures such as restricting coeducation, promoting interest-free banking or mandating prayers during office hours, have been enacted repeatedly by provincial and federal governments seeking to “promote Islam”. According to him, “The circularity of Islamic measures suggests that the revivalist project has a narrow range of options. Its choices are limited by its focus on the traditional view of the Islamic order. While visibly Islam has touched almost all social institutions, it has failed to engender a moral order that would meet contemporary social and economic challenges.” The reforms sought are confined to outward behaviour not to truly spiritual or moral change. Consequently, there is now a chasm between how people believe they live and how they actually live, or in other words, between the imagined and the real.

Qadeer believes that this centrist narrative of Islam runs counter to people’s deep grounding in regional cultures and their ethnic identity, which is why the so-called Islamisation attempts have run into such strong resistance from Sindhi, Baluch and Muhajir movements. I recall Mir Ghaus Bux Bizenjo once telling me in London that “every time another slogan of Islam zindabad is raised from Islamabad, we Baluchis brace ourselves for another military onslaught.” While noting that a brand of Islam promising a millennial moral order has spread into state-run and private institutions, Qadeer points out that it has failed to foster a moral code that would promote efficiency, fairness and justice. The increase in corruption and the intensification of social problems bear evidence of a moral and institutional crisis in the country. Only secularisation can resolve this contradiction, but secularisation is not to be confused with absence of religion, which it invariably is. It means the secularisation of institutions.

Over fifty years ago, Saadat Hasan Manto wrote, “Look, man may be good or evil, but he should remain the way God made him. You can be virtuous without having your head shaved, without donning saffron robes or covering yourself with ash. Those who advocate such things forget that these external manifestations of virtue, if that indeed be what they are, will only get lost on those who follow them. Only ritual will survive. What led to the ritual will be overlooked. Look at all the great prophets. Their teachings are no longer remembered, but we still have their legacy of crosses, holy threads and unshaven armpit hair. They tell you to kill your baser self. Well, if everyone went ahead and did that, what sort of a world would it be!”

The Indo-Pak Track II industry which has been in existence for the last 20 years by now has accounted for millions of dollars in other people’s money but what, one may ask, are its successes? It is constituted by those who once held important positions in government, but have since retired. Why has their conscience caught up with them now? Why couldn’t they do anything for peace, goodwill, free trade, non-proliferation, tourism and stability when they were in a position to influence, if not actually make, policy?

While no one should be grudged a few days in exotic Kathmandu or Colombo or wherever the pre-paid air ticket says the next round is taking place, shouldn’t those who sponsor such essentially futile exercises ask themselves why India and Pakistan remain exactly where they were half a century ago. Had it not been for 9/11 and the mayhem that it unleashed, the ‘peace process’ now underway in the subcontinent would not have been there. So it is not the behind-the-scenes intellectual and diplomatic efforts of those who are in part responsible for the problems they now seem intent on resolving, that have got the present round of talks between New Delhi and Islamabad going.

Whether retired admiral of the Indian Navy, Verges Koitra, is part of Track II or Track III or on a track of his own, I do not know. What I do know is that he was in town last week, promoting his book on Kashmir. He was due to be hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Stimson Center till both realised that they had two nearly clashing events and only one admiral. Wisely, therefore, they joined hands and on Wednesday morning the usual “South Asia suspects”, among which please count this correspondent, gathered at Stimson at too early an hour.

The admiral’s book is called Crafting Peace in Kashmir: Through a Realist Lens. And how is that to be done? Elementary, my friends. Let the Line of Control be made permanent with some autonomy to Indian-held Kashmir (within India that is) and the same thing for the other side, though it will have to be found if that is what the other side wants. It was interesting that nowhere in his talk and the Q&A that followed did the admiral make even a single mention of the people of Pakistan, just the Pakistan Army, which alone, he insisted, was equipped to make a settlement with India. I suppose the 150 million people who pay for that army do not matter. He said things should be seen in ‘the new context’ and it should be understood that the “past cannot be the key to the future”. The ‘stakes’ had changed, he declared (“and so decrees India”, he should have added).

Pakistan would never be able to equal India either in military or economic terms, he said. In fact, its economy was going down the tubes. Pakistan was in decline and today India’s per capita was higher than Pakistan’s. There could be no exchange or transfer of territory, he said. The Kashmiris, he declared — on what basis, he did not say — had no desire to join Pakistan. They wanted ‘autonomy’ (within India). Pakistan, he confided to the audience, knew it was a ‘good time’ to settle Kashmir because in three to four years, it would be “much worse off” than it was today. Kashmir was holding India back from its march to world greatness. The UN Security Council resolutions on Kashmir, he declared blithely, should be “rescinded”. Once that was done and Pakistan was made to sign on the dotted line, meaning the Line of Control, “Asia would be better balanced in respect of China”. That is great thinking, namely recruiting Pakistan against China, its only friend in the world.

I asked the admiral if the Kashmiris indeed agreed to accept ‘autonomy’ within India, what guarantee would they be offered about the permanence of such autonomy, even if it was based on a constitutional amendment, considering that the earlier ‘autonomy’ given to them under Article 370 now stood completely eroded. He made the astonishing answer, though it was in answer to another question, that today Kashmir was under more controls from New Delhi than any other Indian state and if it were given as much autonomy as Uttar Pradesh, the Kashmiris would be quite happy.

All I can do for the good of Admiral Vergese Koitara’s soul is to quote him just one line from that great scholar of Kashmir, M Yusuf Buch (who once said that while thousands had sacrificed their lives for Kashmir, he has done no better than sacrifice his sleep) on this Line of Control ‘solution’. Wrote Buch, “Any unprincipled deal between India and Pakistan, for example, the perpetuation of the infamous Line of Control with some cosmetic changes would be a gratuitous award to extremists from both sides and an undeserved slap in the face of moderates. It is want of a clear perspective that explains the mushrooming of half-baked plans and suggestions authored by fake experts”.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

I have long had a theory, which now borders on conviction, that those whom fate chooses to exercise power and take decisions that affect the rest of our country either do not give a row of pins about what newspapers print, or else they pay attention only when they read – or are read to – what they have already done or what they would like to do. Anything and everything that falls outside of this category is ignored as if it did not exist.

One recent example of this is the question of bringing back Chaudhry Rehmat Ali’s remains from Cambridge to Pakistan. The man credited with coining the word ‘Pakistan’ – a claim questioned to this day by that master politician of the old guard, Aslam Khattak, and denied by another of his Cambridge class fellows of the time – died in straitened circumstances in Cambridge in 1951 and was buried there. There are those who claim that he was exiled from the new country and must, therefore, now be brought back and buried with full honours, if not next to the Quaid-e-Azam himself, then perhaps close to Iqbal or at least at the Minar-e-Pakistan, the site of the 1940 Lahore Resolution. This is a serious matter and should be examined with care.

The move to rebury Chaudhry Rehmat Ali gained a certain amount of attention in London some years ago when a group of Pakistani settlers there, on learning that like them the Chaudhry was a Gujjar by caste, decided that his remains should be dug up and reburied in Pakistan. A visit to Cambridge was undertaken, my friend the journalist Habibur Rehman tells me, and the small group had itself photographed and written about in the London Urdu press. Another friend, Tariq Azim, then a London businessmen and a British citizen, and now a senator, minister of state and information secretary of the ruling party, was part of this little excursion. The event caused no ripples, either in Pakistan or England.

When circumstances made Tariq Azim part of the ruling circle, he whispered into Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain’s ear that the interim prime minister would go down in history if he brought Rehmat Ali to Pakistan as a returning hero. The interim PM obviously believed what he was told because he knew no better and on August 21 declared that he would bring back this great hero of the Pakistan movement “this very year”. “He was a hero of the Muslim League and it will be the Muslim League that will repatriate him to Pakistan,” he said (or so did the PML website). Game, set and match to Sen Tariq Azim, who was and remains innocent of who the “heroes” of the Pakistan movement were, or what Chaudhry Rehmat Ali had written about Pakistan and its founder. I doubt if either Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain or the senator knew of the vile abuse their hero had hurled at the Quaid (“Mr Jinnah has acted the Judas and betrayed, bartered and dismembered the Millat, animated by ambition for recognition as the Quisling-e-Azam of Pakistan and Bangistan… a far worse traitor than Janki in 712, Mir Jaffer in 1757 and the Muslim aristocracy in 1857.”)

One of Chaudhry Rehmat Ali’s apologists recently wrote: “… in October, the year was 1948, the man was hounded out of Pakistan for raising a voice against the ruling elite.” If you want to know what the phrase “ruling elite” means, it means the Quaid-e-Azam himself, Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan, Sardar Abdul Rab Nishtar and, in fact, the entire leadership of the Quaid’s Muslim League. The Chaudhry’s apologists do not have the intellectual honesty to make mention of the abuse he heaped on Pakistan and its founder. I think it is a shame that this should happen and that the interim prime minister should have had the naïveté to make the August 21 announcement. Perhaps the instigator, Sen Tariq Azim, feels that because he is now also minister for overseas Pakistanis, Rehmat Ali falls in his jurisdiction.

I spoke to Prof Anwar Syed last week and he said, “This is frivolous. It is a non-issue and speaks sadly about those who should be dealing with Pakistan’s real problems, not chasing shadows.” After all, there have been so many governments in Pakistan, civil and military. How come none of them has ever expressed any such intent? It is simply because they knew about the scandalous book, The Greatest Betrayal, written by Chaudhry Rehmat Ali weeks after the announcement of the June 3, 1947 plan. The book denounced the Quaid as a British and “Bania” agent and called Pakistan “Pastan”: the shadow of Pakistan. Chaudhry Rehmat Ali was a deeply disturbed man and I recall Dr Ashiq Hussain Batalvi, one of the great historians of the events that led to Pakistan’s creation, that after he came to Pakistan Rehmat Ali spent most of his time abusing the Quaid and pronouncing a hundred curses on the country which he asserted was a betrayal of the Muslims of India.

Rehmat Ali’s concept of Pakistan was nebulous, impractical and fantasy-ridden. It was to include the entire northwest of India, Kashmir, the Kathiawar peninsula, Kutch, and several enclaves deep within UP, including Delhi and Lucknow. There were to be two independent Muslim states besides Pakistan: Bangistan comprising Bengal and Assam in the east and Osmanistan in the south. These two were to form a federation with Pakistan. The 243 principalities or Rajwaras were to be divided among caste Hindus and “others” and then herded together in a ghetto called Hanoodia. As for the Sikhs, they were to be pushed into an enclave called Sikhia. Other races and religions were to inhabit an encampment by the name of Hanadika. Every non-Muslim was to remain subservient to the master race he called “The Paks”. And yes, the subcontinent was to be renamed Dinia. He did not say how he was going to bring all that about.

It is ironic that Chaudhry Rehmat Ali chose to return in disgust to the land of the very imperialists whose agent in his eyes the Quaid was, dying there a bitter and unhappy man. It is best that his bones rest where they lie. In any case, it is un-Islamic to exhume a body for reburial.

One of the best analyses of this subject was made by writer and journalist Munir Ahmed Munir and published in Nawai Waqt on 31 August this year. He writes, “The problem with Chaudhry Rehmat Ali’s admirers is that they consider him the inventor of the word ‘Pakistan’, whereas inventing a name and founding a state are two different things. He had no role to play in the creation of the state where we all live. Even the authorship of the name is controversial. The late Mian Abdul Haq from Sahiwal who knew Chaudhry Rehmat Ali well wrote in Nadai Millat, Lahore, in June 1970 that the word Pakistan was invented by Khawaja Abdul Rahim and he obtained Allama Iqbal’s blessings for his coinage. On 21 December 1987, Rahim told a meeting at the Aiwan-e-Nawai Waqt in Rawalpindi that he it was who had invented the word Pakistan and that this name was first announced at a meeting of the Khyber Union of Students over which he was presiding… If the mere writing of a pamphlet could create countries, the map of the world would change every day.”

Munir writes: “In every respect, Chaudhry Rehmat Ali’s Pakistan was quite different from the Quaid’s Pakistan. The Chaudhry himself admitted that Jinnah’s Pakistan was not his Pakistan because there were seven or eight other imaginary and utopian ‘…stans’ linked with his. Behind the Quaid’s demand for Pakistan lay realism, statesmanship, wisdom and the 1,000-year sweep of Muslim history in India…. A man who abuses the founder of Pakistan and accuses him of having destroyed his Pakistan plan, is described by Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain as, ‘a great leader of the Pakistan movement and a hero of the Muslim League.’ If that be so, then why not also dig up the remains of Mir Sadiq and Mir Jafar and bring them to Pakistan for reburial?”

The advent of Pakistani television in America is in many ways a disaster for those from our country who have made the United States their home. Its deleterious effects are already evident and with time they will only multiply.

It is now possible — and hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis are proof of that — to live in America in a physical sense, but for all other purposes remain in Pakistan. Were it the Pakistan as it actually is, it could perhaps be a good thing, but the Pakistan they live is the Pakistan of soap operas and the India of pirated DVD movies. Since most of the movies that can be rented or bought are Indian, the average Pakistani also lives a vicarious life in an India of the mind where everyone is dancing and singing in large, costumed groups and chorus lines all the time. If someone who knew nothing about India were to watch only Indian movies, he would come to believe that the only thing Indians do is dance and, further, that every Indian excels in calisthenics.

There are now three TV channels from Pakistan available on the satellite dish for an average cost of $15 a channel. There is not a single programme on any of them that has anything to do with this country. All programming has been prepared for a Pakistani audience living in Pakistan, not for those living abroad. However, that is of no concern to those who watch these channels. They may be living here physically but their minds and hearts are elsewhere. Every important visitor from Pakistan who comes here reinforces this escapism by telling his audience that they may be living in America but their hearts only beat for Pakistan. The Pakistanis lap up this sort of rubbish and I have never heard the applause to be lustier than when such a line is delivered.

After 9/11, most Pakistanis have gone into a cocoon. The soap operas that flow from the three Pakistani channels — marriage being the one and only theme — provide them with the escape that they think they need. The fact that it makes them non-functional in an emotional and psychological sense in this society, matters very little. They don’t see this slide into the never-never land of a never-never Pakistan as anything but normal.

The Pakistani press — there are at least four weekly Urdu newspapers from New York — is even worse in the sense that little of its space or attention is devoted to the country where its readers live or to the problems that they have to deal with. I have in front of me one of these newspapers. Only the top half of the page carries news, the lower half ads, including one from “Bokhari Sahib of Brighton, England, who promises to solve every problem under the sun”. He is adept at countering and reversing black magic and satanic spells. He can also “bring back your annoyed beloved”. Over 60 percent of the stories on page one relate to Pakistan. The back page (the upper half only, the lower being ads) has 13 stories, 10 of them about Pakistan.

As for the editorial pages, the leading article is about Shaukat Aziz’s remarks after taking office. The paper’s regular columnists are (with or without permission) Abdul Qadir Hasan, Hasan Nisar, Munnoo Bhai, Abbas Athar, Ataul Haq Qasimi, Zahoor Awan, Raja Anwar and eight others. Of the 15 columns, only two are devoted to an America-related subject. Most columns and news is lifted from the Pakistani press. The example is typical. The younger generation of Pakistanis cannot read Urdu, so the newspapers that we see today will either go out of business or change with the times.

I am not suggesting that once you migrate to another country, you should erase the memory of the country you came from. All I am pointing out is that most of our people live in cocoons and remain unmindful of what goes on around them and show no interest in the culture, literature or politics of the country where they live. Of those who try to reach out, a large majority do so out of snobbery. All they perhaps want is a picture on their living room wall with a senator or a congressman. There are of course those who are seriously involved in American political and social life but their number is abysmally small.

Only rarely, if at all, have I seen a Pakistani at a museum, an art gallery or a theatre. Also uncommon, in fact, most uncommon, is the sight of a Pakistani family eating at a non-Pakistani restaurant. The unreality of the lives that our people live here is hard to believe but that is the way it is.

However, I must close this column as it is time for my daily dose of a Pakistani TV soap opera called Ye Shadi Nahin ho Sakti.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

How many people in Pakistan have read, I have been wondering since I put down what to my surprise turned out to be an “unputdownable” book, the late Maj Gen AO Mitha’s posthumously published autobiography, Unlikely Beginnings. Not many, one should presume, barring some in the army who knew the general, the man who raised the Special Service Group (SSG) in the 1960s. From the anonymity in which, he believed, such a special force must remain, it has since become something of a public spectacle and a showpiece, guarding important generals, including Gen Pervez Musharraf, and showing off on Republic Day parades, running on the double, knees kicked high up to the chin, with the men, a good many of them bearded, screaming “Haq Haq”. One does hope it is not a reference to Gen Zia-ul-Haq. The SSG also puts up a show of daredevilry for important visitors admitted to the Attock Fort. Why? I do not know and one shouldn’t even ask in a country where army messes are now rented out as shadi ghars for people to celebrate their weddings.

Gen Mitha was born to an affluent and politically influential Memon family in Bombay in 1923. His grandfather was a knight and important enough to have the viceroy of India accept a dinner invitation from him at the Taj. Mitha grew up in Bombay and the chapter devoted to his childhood and early years and how the joint family system, presided over by an imperious grandfather and an omnipresent, all-powerful grandmother who inspected her married daughters-in-law’s separate living quarters for any signs of undusted furniture, deserves to be included in a sociology textbook.

Mitha was a defiant young man and to his grandfather’s shock and anger rejected the career in business that had been chosen for him. He also rejected the bride that had been earmarked for him. He decided that he was going to find a career in the army. Accordingly, after finishing high school he joined a pre-cadet academy, and was selected for a commission in the British Indian army. He passed out of the Indian Military Academy, Dehra Dun, in 1942 and daredevil that he was, volunteered for the Parachute Regiment. He served in Burma and was dropped behind Japanese lines for high-risk operations. What I found somewhat shocking – because I had always thought otherwise – was the blatant racism that British officers practised against their Indian colleagues. If there were ten officers in a mess, two of them British, they would see to it that they had little, if anything, to do with their Indian counterparts. Thousands of Indians laid down their lives in the two Great Wars which had nothing to do with them. One can only speculate what would have happened if the Allies had lost the war and Subhas Chandar Bose’s Indian National Army, which contained many Muslims, had found the future of post-British India in its hands. It is one of those great unknowables about which we can only hazard a guess.

Mitha opted for Pakistan in 1947 even after his parents, who had first decided to go to Pakistan, changed their minds. Just around that time, he fell in love with Indu, daughter of Prof Chatterji of Government College, who had grown up in Lahore, but had since moved to Delhi. That it was not just puppy love but something more lasting was proved by Mitha’s perseverance, and four years after the young lovers’ separation Indu, against the wishes of her family, came over to Karachi and they were married. He remained in love with her till the end of his life. They had three wonderful daughters, two of them highly talented classical dancers.

Mitha describes the GHQ in Rawalpindi of the early days of Pakistan in graphic detail, with junior officers using wooden packing cases for desks and chairs and bringing their own pencils to work. Toilet paper that the British used to call “bog paper” was used to write on, as ordinary paper was just not available. “When I see the offices in GHQ today, with wall-to-wall carpeting, panelled walls and full air conditioning, I wonder how and why this desire for luxurious working conditions has crept in,” he wrote with some sadness. In 1953-54 officers above the rank of lieutenant-colonel were asked if Pakistan should accept US military aid. Mitha suggested that Pakistan should not, because aid would prevent the country from developing its own arms industry and leave it at the mercy of the Americans. It will also develop a “beggar mentality”, he predicted presciently.

This wise advice was, of course, ignored. The SSG was set up at the suggestion of the Americans as a force that would operate against the Russians if they overran West Pakistan. Cherat was chosen as the highly restricted site where the commandos were to be trained and based. The trainers were mostly Americans from the CIA, who came with their families, setting up a little America with all its gadgetry and attendant luxuries. Mitha’s sole instruction to his handpicked Pakistani officers was: “Be proud of your poverty.” He remained head of the SSG for six years and it was an SSG detachment that buried him with fullhonours, sounding the last post as it lowered this soldier’s soldier in his grave four years ago.

Gen Mitha was retired when he was just over 48 years old because Gen Gul Hasan added his name to a list of officers whose retirements were announced by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in his first speech as president on December 20, 1971. It was a most treacherous blow as Mitha was too good a soldier and too reverent of tradition and rules to have had any Bonapartist ambitions. He had no hand in the officers’ “revolt” at Gujranwala and the hooting down of Gen Hamid at a GHQ meeting, events that, ironically, pushed out Yahya. In fact, it was Gul Hasan himself who was Bonapartist, something Bhutto always knew. He only used Gul Hasan.

According to Gen Mitha, it was Gul Hasan who saved Brig Zia-ul-Haq, as he then was, from being sacked. Zia was in Jordan. The year was 1971. Gen Yahya received a signal from Maj Gen Nawazish, the head of the Pakistan military mission in Amman, asking that Zia be court-martialled for disobeying GHQ orders by commanding a Jordanian armour division against the Palestinians in which thousands were slaughtered. That ignominious event is known as Operation Black September. It was Gul Hasan who interceded for Zia and had Yahya let him off. Mitha was treated very badly. His Hilal-i-Jurat was withdrawn in February 1972, something that also appears to have been Gul Hasan’s handiwork. He remained under surveillance through the Bhutto years. All doors of employment were closed on him and had it not been for the generosity of a friend living abroad, who asked Mitha to manage his farm for him, he would have been on the street.

After he died, one of his friends wrote to his wife, “At the end of a tumultuous life, all he wanted was a room to sleep in, one to write and eat in – a space to walk, reflect and gaze across the fields to the distant hills.” That is not a bad epitaph for a soldier.

There seems to be much too much going on in Washington. Hardly had President Pervez Musharraf left town than we were hit by two important visitors from Pakistan: the smooth and affable Humayun Akhtar Khan who, but for the whimsical gods who preside over the ebb and flow of fortunes, would have been where Mr Shaukat Aziz now sits or, maybe, stands. And of course very much in town has been Mr Ishrat Hussain, governor of the State Bank who has sent all the kerbside moneychangers in Pakistan out of business since they have no more dollars to sell, the governor having raked all of them into his vaults. Nadeem ul Haq, the iconoclastic economist, though he works for the World Bank in Cairo, is never closer to a fight than when someone tells him that Pakistan’s reserves of foreign exchange have risen by so many million. “What use are those reserves to man or beast?” he asks.

Talking of surprises, till I heard it from Gen Musharraf’s own lips, I hadn’t realised how close I could have come to buying the PIA for no more than one single dollar, the price at most soda vending machines here for a can of Coke. Why Gen Musharraf turned down this most public-spirited suggestion from his finance minister, and now his prime minister, the General did not tell us. Since I am not an economist, I do not know what school of thought this proposal represents, but could its name be the Bargain Basement school of economics?

Mr Humayun Akhtar Khan is also here and staying at the Watergate Hotel, but I can assure you he is bugging no one, only trying to explore with American buyers of Pakistani textiles what the shape of the world is going to be once WTO comes marching in and textile quotas that Western countries, notably the United States, impose on Third World textiles, stand abolished. At lunch on Wednesday with about 15 buyers of Pakistani textiles breaking bread with him, the one thing I understood was that everyone is running scared of China. One buyer said China was going to take 90 percent of the market. “Could it be called the China Syndrome?” the Commerce Minister asked, providing the only light-hearted moment in an otherwise grim meeting.

Also in town this last week have been a number of our lawmakers, among them Shah Mahmood Qureshi, Naveed Qamar and Nisar Khurro. And what brings them to Washington and parts miscellaneous? The State Department, which is just as well, since the government back home is running anyway, legislature or no legislature. In fact, some of us can’t help wondering why Gen Musharraf puts up with legislatures since half the time of the presiding officers in Islamabad is spent trying to keep Mr Safdar Abbasi, Dr Sher Afghan et al from putting up a display of freestyle wrestling on the floor. I am sure one of these days, our two houses of parliament will also make laws and thus give some respite to our poor Ministry of Law which has done nothing since this assembly came into being except draft ordinances. Why do we have so many laws in our country when, frankly, nobody gives a pair of figs for any law? Wouldn’t we be better off with just one law: the old, trusted Martial Law?

Also due to take place at the weekend here is the World Sindhi Conference, which this year is pretty radioactive, Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy being the keynote speaker. The conference which is organised by Munawar Leghari who also makes it a point to stage protest demonstrations on every Republic and Independence Day (he was even seen standing with some people, all waving placards and screaming, outside Hotel Mayflower where Gen Musharraf was speaking). Why he thinks he can stop the Kalabagh Dam this way, I have no idea. He has been out of Pakistan for many years and has probably forgotten that our governments have perfected the art of going ahead with whatever they have already decided. “Nice shot but no run,” is all I can say to Mr Leghari.

Meanwhile, we await Gen Jehangir Karamat’s arrival, who is one general everyone says nice things about. It proves that not all generals eat babies for breakfast. Take Gen de Gaulle for one, who has been lately in the news when everyone thought he had croaked.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

The autobiography is a tricky genre. Some, if not most, are written in order to extol the virtues of the writer, proclaiming his achievements while leaving out anything that might suggest the contrary. Some autobiographies are written with as much honesty as human beings can be capable of, warts and all, and those are the ones that outlast the kind where the writer projects himself as the centre of the universe. Some autobiographies are a mishmash of fact and fiction, the best example being Qudratullah Shahab’s Shahabnama which can most accurately be described as fictionalised fact. The book has gone into edition after edition and though the author is no longer around to enjoy his continuing ticket to fame (and at least a sliver of fortune) he must also be smiling to himself at the caper he has pulled.

As far as I know until Prof Pervez Ahmed Parvazi’s book Pas Nawisht came out last year, no one had attempted a comprehensive and critical appraisal of every autobiography of note published in Urdu in the last eight or nine decades. When asked how long it had taken him to write the book, Parvazi had replied, “Several years, because the books had first to be procured – scores being out of print – and then read.” In the end, with help from friends in India and Pakistan, he managed to complete, while living in Sweden, a fascinating study. What I found refreshing about the work was its honesty. If he found someone, no matter how elevated the person was, as having been less than honest or having made things up, he felt no hesitation in saying so. Such lack of “good manners” is most welcome because it is in the tradition of Saadat Hasan Manto who spared no one, including his best friends, when writing about them. A reading of Ganjay Frishtey will show the maestro at his most typical with observations like, “I cannot straighten the crossed eyes of Agha Hashr nor make his mouth shed flowers when what it shed was abuse.”

One autobiographer, Mir Wilayat Hussain, recalling the last days of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, writes that his son Syed Mahmood (who suffered from temporary bouts of madness) threw the old man out of the house, forcing him to move in with a friend which was where he died. His burial expenses were paid by Nawab Mohsin-ul-Mulk who observed, “At least he will no longer pester me for a contribution [for Aligarh].” Khawaja Hasan Nizami’s autobiography, though carefully edited, did to his credit contain the admission that he was an egoist and though he knew flattery to be bad, he loved to have flatterers around him and always wanted to do things that went against his conscience. He also confessed to being stonehearted, having felt little grief at the death of his two sons and his wife.

Zulfiqar Ali Bokhari’s autobiography has some delightful anecdotes, such as a maulana complaining to the information minister Khawaja Shahabuddin that Radio Pakistan, Karachi, had sent him home in the same car as Ustad Bundo Khan, the musician. The minister told Bokhari to apologise. When reminded by the enraged maulana that no apology had to date been made, the minister phoned Bokhari. “But sir, I have already apologised – to Ustad Bundu Khan,” Bokhari replied. When Bokhari appeared for an interview for a job with All India Radio before Lionel Fielden, he was wearing a suit and walking with two dogs on a leash. Fielden who was wearing an undershirt and shorts was furious. “Why are you so dressed up and why the dogs?” he asked. “The dogs, because they don’t ask me why I am so dressed up,” Bokhari answered. The two became lifelong friends.

Parvazi is harsh on Shahab, but not unfairly. “His autobiography fails to transcend the level associated with a bureaucrat who is self-satisfied and used to imposing his will on others, a man whose entire life has been spent, in the words of his orderly, ‘sahib bahadur attending to affairs of the state.’” He quotes Intizar Husain as saying that once at Jamila Hashmi’s house, Shahab read out excerpts from Shahabnama, saying they were from a novel he was writing. Josh Malihabadi’s Yadoon ki Baraat is an elegantly written book that contains self-congratulatory accounts of 18 of the poet’s love affairs, though it is known that he was terrified of his wife who would make him keep account for every penny he had earned from mushairas. Kishwar Naheed – whose autobiography Ek Burri Aurat ki Katha stands in a class apart – told me once that Josh’s last days were most miserable.

According to Parvazi, “There may not be another who would be able to evoke his past with the same intensity as Josh.” Some people have said that not all that Josh wrote is true. Whether that is so or not, the fact is that no one had a greater command on Urdu than this extraordinary man who remained one of Jawaharlal Nehru’s favourite people and who came to Pakistan despite Nehru’s personal request that he remain in India. At the end of his life, Josh regretted his decision. In one verse he compared his being in Karachi to Imam Hussain being in Kufa.

Two remarkable autobiographies listed in the book are those of Akhtar Hussain Raipuri and Hameeda Akhtar Hussain (parents of the Daily Times columnist Irfan Hussain). Even as a young girl, Hameeda was overawed by no one when it came to expressing her opinion. Once she visited Gandhi’s ashram where everyone was sitting on the floor, including Sarojini Naidu. “If you don’t mind,” she told the mahatma, “this whole thing looks to me like a tamasha. Here are these people sweeping the floor, filling containers with water, picking up cow dung, but when they return home, they revert to their roles as sahib bahadurs and memsahibs. This morning I saw Sarojini Naidu sweeping the floor, when at home she wouldn’t so much as get up to pour herself a glass of water.”

Intizar Husain’s autobiography Yaddon ka Dhuaan is a literary memoir of the Lahore of the 1950s and the 1960s. He writes that when as part of the Ayub regime’s effort to control writers, Qudratullah Shahab was assigned the task of establishing the Writers’ Guild, the only writer of note who refused to join was the great Maulana Salahuddin Ahmed who said, “Writers are prophets and prophets do not form guilds.” The rest fell in line as membership opened several doors to them, such as Radio Pakistan, which had earlier been forbidden territory for them. The guild was also a sinister move to infiltrate and take over the Progressive Writers’ Movement. Shahab also played the pivotal role in the takeover of the Progressive Papers Ltd, a turning point in Pakistan’s intellectual history.

Intiazar ends his book on a sad but truthful note, “I think of how one began life in Pakistan and where one stands today! Just this should suffice that the few times in the year that I go to the mosque for prayers, such as on the day of Eid, it is under armed guard. In the Islamic Republic, the most unsafe place is the mosque. So this is the way the evening of life has come in the land where it had begun its morning!”

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