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I do not remember the year but it was either 1995 or 1996. The event I do recall, but where it was held I do not, nor do I remember who the sponsors were. What I have not forgotten is that it was a meeting in Washington, where Najam Sethi spoke about the rapidly advancing menace of religious extremism, which he predicted was going to do horrible things to Pakistan and the world in the name of Islam. If his speech could be summed up in one line, it was: the Fundos are coming, the Fundos are coming. “That’s my nightmare,” he said.

He was followed by Agha Murteza Pooya, the founder and publisher of The Muslim, about whom Altaf Gauhar once said, “The Muslim is bankable, Agha Murteza Pooya is not.” This profound observation was made when as editor of the newspaper he tried without much success to raise money for the perennially cash-strapped newspaper. Pooya told the meeting, “Najam Sethi’s nightmare is my dream.” It is time, therefore, more than a decade later, that Agha Pooya were asked to share his joy and blessings with the rest of us since his dream and Najam’s nightmare have both come true.

There is much to the city of Washington that makes it a place to which Ian Botham would not like to send his mother in law. That I would grant. The heart of the city, or the downtown area, goes dead as soon as the evening falls. While it is not unsafe to walk some of the streets in the dark, only the brave or the ignorant or the happily inebriated would venture out in certain others. There are areas where cab drivers would not go for love or money, even in the noonday sun.

But Washington has its good points, one being that it gets a lot of interesting visitors from Pakistan. My list of interesting visitors does not include the VVVVIPs from Islamabad, who come for reasons that often lie in the realm of mystery. One such gent is Muhammadmian Soomro, the distinguished chairman of the Senate, who was here even last week, though what he was doing was as unclear now as it has been in the past. I think it is only a matter of time before we get the opportunity to welcome once again the distinguished speaker of the National Assembly, whom I have decided to name Sindbad Sialkoti.

The out-gone governor of the State Bank, Monsignor Ishrat Hussain, was another of our regulars and once complained to me that I had complained in print about his all too frequent visits, which he assured me were no more than two to three a year — and on state business too. Perhaps he was right because I always had trouble counting.

The most fun visitor this year so far has been Dawn publisher and chief executive Hameed Haroon who brought a slide show to town that raised more questions than it answered. There he was at the Johns Hopkins University’s school of international relations, dressed nattily in a suit and tie — a sartorial manifestation of his to which I was a stranger, having always seen him in a white kurta and shalwar — and smiling benignly at his large audience, which included many students. He was introduced by Robert Andersen, the director of the South Asia programme, in appropriately flattering terms.

A sidekick, who sat in front of a dainty notebook — the light and steal-able kind — came to life as the auditorium went dark, which was the end of my note-taking before it had begun because I have yet to learn how to see and write in the dark.

The name of the show, we were told, was “Politics, Media and Cultural Conflict in Pakistan”, the subtitle being ‘Terrorstructure’ (yes, one word). He said the Pakistani society was not paralysed by terrorism, though his stained glass window had shattered every time there was a bomb blast a block away from his residence (called Sea Breeze, if I recall). Well that is that in Pakistan, there was no end to the greed of the religious right, because it was the darling of the establishment. “But we are fighting”, he declared heroically.

We were shown a dozen slides of Mughal and Rajput miniatures, but tantalisingly what Mr Haroon did not explain was why every princess and prince was holding a copy of Dawn. As was to be expected, we were also shown a slide of the Quaid reading the Dawn (which he actually did, having founded the paper, which does make his heirs its true owners).

Mr Haroon spoke about the struggle lodged by the press in Pakistan for its rights and we were shown facsimiles of a dozen ads that Mr Haroon’s paper had run, all addressed to “Mr President” on the subject of the Wage Board award for journalists. He said only the privately-owned newspapers had been targeted. The All Pakistan Newspaper Society, he thundered, had been fighting that law for the last seven years and had the means to fight back seven more.

After the show was over — few in the audience knew what kettle of fish the Wage Board was and why Mr Haroon had run a dozen ads rubbishing it — I heard one student ask another, “Why didn’t Mr Haroon run a dozen ads in his newspaper asking General Musharraf to take off his uniform and go home?” Since I had no answer to that one, I pretended I hadn’t heard the question.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

These days everyone has a Kashmir solution. Yousuf Buch said recently that when it came to Kashmir, there was no shortage of “whats,” but what were missing were the “hows.” It is very easy for those who are not living in Indian Kashmir, have never been there and are not really keen to get too deeply involved in the issue to declare in judgmental style how the Kashmir “problem” should be solved. Some do that out of goodwill, others to display their knowledge of “international affairs,” this being a common and incurable Pakistani mental ailment. Some speak out of ignorance, others because of impatience with a situation that refuses to go away.

The latest category of pandits is of more recent origin. They want the question either put on a cold backburner that won’t be lit for the foreseeable future or to be shelved once and for all in the interest of what they hope will be peace and good relations with India. A friend of mine, who is going great guns in this country and is on the “must invite” list of most organisers of conferences on Islam, the Palestinian question and, of course, Pakistan and what to do about it, in a recent column that appeared in more than one paper in more than two time zones, has joined the growing chorus of those who want the Kashmir issue to be resolved on the basis of “realism.” All the “realism” advocated, ironically, is to be shown by Pakistan, none by India, which holds Kashmir militarily and against the will of the majority of its people.

The dispute, these advocates of “realism” emphasise, has gone on too long and now stands in the way of India finding its rightful place in the world and Pakistan coming to terms with its reduced size and influence. The prosperity of India’s one billion people and Pakistan’s 150 million citizens depends on Kashmir disappearing as an issue, they argue. They also urge Pakistan to recognise and accept the fact that it is no match to India, will never be, and before it is overwhelmed by its larger neighbour, politically, economically and diplomatically, to make peace, but make peace on India’s terms. That indeed is the message, shorn of the dishonest language it is packaged in.

In all such recipes, the first assumption is that Kashmir is an India-Pakistan issue and must be decided between the two governments. The people of Kashmir do not really figure in, nor are they given any role. I would invite these philosophers and statesman-academics to visit Srinagar and just spend a day visiting the graveyards where thousands of young Kashmiris lie buried under mounds of earth, dead in the prime of life at the hands of India’s army and paramilitary forces. Graveyards have been the only growth industry in Kashmir. No one who has stood even for a few minutes in what the Kashmiris call the Martyrs Graveyard on the outskirts of the city of Srinagar and read the tombstones, can ever feel the same way about Kashmir, nor can he ever advocate a “solution” that leaves out Kashmiris, the only party that matters, the only party that is a party to the Kashmir issue. All others are disputants.

Even if India and Pakistan decide to come to a settlement without the Kashmiris, the Kashmiris are not going to go away, unless they are all physically liquidated, which won’t be the first time it has happened in history. Genocides do take place and have taken place in our own time and in front of our own eyes in Africa and even Europe. Analysts like my friend, who advocate that the governments of India and Pakistan should “resolve” the Kashmir dispute so that they can get on the golden road of economic development, show no understanding, or even sympathy for a life worse than hell the Kashmiris have lived since 1947. The “realism” advocated by this tribe is actually surrender and capitulation. If there is one principled position Pakistan has taken, it is to stand up for the right of self-determination for the people of Kashmir. Now it is being asked to adjust that position on the basis of “realism” and “pragmatism.”

The Kashmiris do not accept the annexation of their land and though they are practically leaderless today, they are not going to give in. How one wishes someone like KH Khurshid was alive today, the man who was the first to call for true and unfettered self-determination for the people of this unfortunate state. He suffered the consequences of advocating such heresy but he remained undeterred till the end. He died in a road accident in 1988, which some believe was not accidental. In September 1986, he travelled on his own to Harare, where the Eighth Nonaligned Summit was being held, causing Zia-ul-Haq, who was there, much anxiety. Khurshid met Kenneth Kaunda, Moammar Gaddafi, Yasser Arafat, Robert Mugabe, Daniel Ortega, Fidel Castro and around ten foreign ministers. He also presented a memorandum on Kashmir to the nonaligned leaders, despite efforts by the Zia delegation to sabotage his lone effort.

Some of the points Khurshid made are even more valid today than they were twenty years ago. He told the leaders of the Summit, “To the people of Kashmir, the question is a basic one: it is that of their human, fundamental and political right of freedom. Freedom to shape their country according to its own traditions and to their own wishes; freedom to have their own system of government and establish their own norms; freedom to carve out the path of their destiny.”

Khurshid wrote: “We demand that India and Pakistan withdraw their troops and facilitate the holding of a free and impartial plebiscite in the State after its reunification as contained in the United Nations resolutions. The people of Kashmir in both parts should be reunited and allowed unhindered to determine and decide their future. That is the only peaceful solution to the problem.”

What Khurshid demanded twenty years ago was as unacceptable to the powers that be then as it is today. And that is where the tragedy of Kashmir lies.

It is heavy going these days, wherever you look. Leaving Iraq aside, there is this business of Comrade Ahmadinejad declaring exactly a day before the IAEA chief was to arrive in Tehran to ask him to stop enriching uranium that his country was now a member of the nuclear club.

He announced, standing behind a lectern, on which at least a ton of flowers had been placed, that all 164 of his centrifuges were now operational, busy enriching uranium. What Iran needs with enriched uranium, given all the oil it has for the next thousand years, it is hard to say. Maybe the Iranian president just loves picking up fights. Maybe he gets a kick out of sticking his tongue out at Republicans and members of Neocon Inc. But he may only have ended up making President Bush’s day, who might see in this yet another opportunity to kick butt.

In case, Seymour Hersch is right and Iran is indeed going to be hit, the price of oil will go up so high that two-thirds of cars in the world will be junked, which may be great news for environment freaks. Bingo! No greenhouse effect. The ozone layer patched up and the earth saved. Will the horse and buggy come back? When there were still horses on the streets of London, Lady Astor was asked what she thought of young people smooching on the street. “I don’t mind,” she replied, “as long as they don’t frighten the horses.”

But back to bad news. One way of shutting it out is not to read it in the first place. If you stop reading newspapers for a month and refrain from watching news on the telly or listening to it on the radio, not only will your digestion improve but so will your mind. Faiz Ahmed Faiz once said that newspapers one should only glance at occasionally because “aiham khabar tau patta chal hi jaati hai.” (Important news one gets to learn of anyway.)

Instead of the daily dose of bad and heavy news first thing in the morning, I would suggest one read through the pages of World Weekly News. The great advantage of this American grocery store checkout tabloid is that none of the news it prints is true. But it is immensely amusing. It also carries my favourite columnist, Ed Anger.

Some time ago when his bum ticker took him to a hospital, he was gravely disillusioned when the nurses who tended to him turned out to be, in his words, “coyote-ugly” with “faces that would stop a clock and butts as broad as a barn door”. Back in the old days, he wailed, “the prettiest gals in the world were nurses and stewardesses.” No hard feelings PIA, but one could say the same about the national carrier. One can only wonder where the Nilofar Javeris of yesteryear have gone?

Currently, this being income-tax filing time in the US, Ed Anger is mad at the IRS which, he points out, has made 15,000 changes to the federal tax code since 1986. Things have reached a point where the average Joe feels completely lost as he sits down, pen in hand, wondering what he owes to Uncle Sam or Uncle Sam to him. Anger has a theory. He believes the tax return form has been devised in a country where English is the third language.

One also learns that Nessie, the Loch Ness monster in Scotland, is tired of being hunted and hounded. Everyone needs privacy, including monsters of the deep. Then there is Dolly, the new agony aunt at the paper. One Steve who asked her what he should have done with the lady on the bus who kept yakking on her mobile phone, Dolly offered great advice. She said Steve should have played the game he must have played as a kid, namely to repeat everything until the other kid either shuts up or goes away. This advice is as good in Pakistan as in the US, since everyone, including Charlie’s aunt, is now carrying a mobile and yapping away.

But the most unusual news comes from Lamoine, Maine, where the mayor has decided to take action because it rained on his parade. He has decided to sue the Almighty Himself. Rain destroyed the floats that were going to be the principal attraction in the town’s parade. The mayor decided to sue the “responsible party”. “God knew what was at stake for us, He had the power to hold off the rain — and He chose not to,” mayor Todd Snider said.

The mayor’s legal team has served the appropriate legal documents to officials at the Vatican and in Jerusalem, fully expecting the Almighty to respond. “Taking the oath in court may be tricky,” Snider said, “but I’m sure we’ll get this figured out. After all, you-know-who likes those who help themselves.”

There is also the disquieting news that Big Foot, who used to live on a natural diet of fruits, nuts and berries, a weight watcher’s dream chow, has gone the way of all flesh. He is now big time into junk food and the results are obvious: the guy has gone fat and flabby. Had Yahya Khan been around, he would have made him a general and Big Foot would have blended in nicely with the rest of them. But old Yahya is gone, as are his F&F cronies, which takes care of Big Foot’s one chance of becoming a general.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Where is Muhammad Khalid Akhtar, the Saint of Chakiwara, the Sage of Bahawalpur, the dreamer of lost horizon, when we need him most! He wanted to see the dawn of the 21st century, although he was a man who would have been the happiest in much earlier, more romantic times. He has been gone for four years now and no doubt he is looking for zebras which are actually cleverly painted donkeys that he can palm off to the great heavenly circus and since it doesn’t rain in heaven, there is no chance of the fake zebras being found out by the angel police. And even if their cover is blown, the winged ones who oversee the department of recreation and entertainment will wink at Muhammad Khalid Akhtar and ask him to read to them one of his Chacha Abdul Baqi-nephew Bakhtiar Khilji stories.

His collected works are under publication by his favourite people: Ajmal Kamal of Aaj . But to keep MKA’s tribe happy in the meanwhile, they have published a special issue of the quarterly journal entirely made up of a selection of MKA’s writings, including his absolutely priceless parodies. I don’t know of a better parodist than the Saint. He was so good that had it not been for the comic bits, Qurratulain Hyder would have mistaken his writing for her own. A sample of that masterpiece in my less than perfect translation follows. But before turning to Annie, who was known in her day to grab a gun if crossed, let it be noted that she has since mellowed. When I went to see her last spring across the Jamuna in Noida, Ghazipur, she told me she had trouble with her ears, then wagged a finger in my face and said, “Now don’t go and write ke Annie behri ho gayi .” She remained one of MKA’s favourite people.

MKA produced a large number of masterly pieces of humour but few more funny than his review of Mukhtar Masood’s Awaz-i-Dost , his self-indulgent ruminations over his autograph book. For those not familiar with the said gent, once of the Civil Serpents of Pakistan aka CSP (resurrected since under the harmless-sounding acronym of DMG), he kept an autograph book that only contained the autographs of people who could come up to the author’s exacting moral standards. With some exceptions, they also had to be Musalmeen. To an iconoclast like MKA, this was like a red rag is to a bull.

Mukhtar Masood’s book starts with his reflections on Minar-i-Pakistan, the ugly memorial to a great event in history, with whose construction he had something to do as Commissioner of Lahore (an office now abolished, courtesy Maj Gen. “Gorbachev” Naqvi). MKA writes, “While reading through this account, it seemed to this faqir that a trimmed up, nattily turned out holder of exalted rank has perched himself on top of the memorial so that he can be seen by one and all. What worries him at the same time is the fear that his trousers may get creased and the necktie around his neck may not remain properly knotted. How I wish instead of writing this soulless masterpiece on Minar-i-Pakistan, you had written the story of that working man who along with a hundred of his companions raised this tower by lugging brick and mortar on his back.”

As this is MKA on the autograph book, “Like big game hunters in Africa who, armed with gun and rifle, go stalking the bearded lion and the river hippo, you with autograph book in hand are a menace to the known and the famous. You do not obtain the quarry’s autograph unless you are entirely satisfied about his greatness. Not in front of every Tom, Dick and Harry do you place your autograph book so that he could inscribe two words of his choice in it. . . Your standards are exacting and mistakes you do not make. The followers of Hinduism may be bright and good, but what of that! Most Christians left this world carrying in their hearts the unfulfilled desire of signing your book. You paid no attention to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, although it was his ardent, heartfelt wish to gain the honour of getting his name included in your autograph book. To Bibi Sarojini Naidoo, you presented your book with much reluctance because she had sided with the followers of Islam, apart from memorising the Quran. Toynbee of England,historian of the world, gained the honour of making the book because common to you both was love of history; and Toynbee’s view of Islam was above prejudice. Fortunate was Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah that he successfully met the test you use to calculate greatness. Poor Allama Iqbal got left out because he did not quite measure up. After all, he was just a poet with the temperament of a faqir, a dervaish, who did not come up to your standards. Cooped up in his ramshackle Mayo Road house, he would smoke his huqqa all day, dressed in none-too-clean a vest and a sheet of cloth around his waist.”

And now for MKA’s parody of Qurratulain Hyder called Meray bhi Gymkhanay , a brilliant take on her vovel, Meray bhi Sanam-khanay. “Time is flying and you now have to decide Miss Qamar . . . Miss Qamar . . . Miss Qamar,” she said to herself, “if you are going to continue living in cloud cuckooland. Will you continue to see dreams that have neither head nor tail?” That’s what she kept thinking all through that Mad Hatter party. To her right sat her dear Miss Ellen Hashmi and Rani Bhagair Singh, their elbows on the table, carrying on an earnest conversation about the race course. “Today Raja Sahib Bahadur lost ten thousand rupees on Black Beauty, but it was the bookie who slipped him the wrong tip,” Rani Bhagair Singh said, putting the blame on the bookie.

“These bookies are nothing but cheats, unreliable,” Miss Ellen Hashmi added, while adjusting her false eyelashes that Col Shamim Rizvi had just brought for her from Paris. She thus put the stamp of finality on bookies.

From the next table, Rajkumar Ghumsan Rai and Begum Waseem Ahmed were discussing free love in a very intellectual manner. “CM Joad is of the view,” Begum Waseem Ahmed said, while adjusting her sari in femme fatale style, “that the real cause of frustration lies in modern social life treating free love as taboo.”

Raja Ghumsan Rai, twirled his moustache and said to himself, “Middle sticks! But where is the taboo? Had Sir Robert Swine not placed my districts in the Court of Wards, and had I been the Zamindar of Baglapur today, I would have proved that free love is utter rubbish.” He drew in a long, cold breath, “These intellectual highbrow women make all kinds of exaggerated claims about free love, but in practical terms, they are middle sticks.”

Is it any wonder then that the Saint of Chakiwara was Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s favourite writer?

If the Indo-US nuclear cooperation deal, now before Congress, has a godmother it is none other than Condoleezza Rice. She is credited with fashioning this administration’s India policy whereby India is to be helped become a global power in the 21st century.

Rice’s appearances before the Senate and the House committees on April 5 were instructive. At times it all felt like an Indian love fest with the Secretary of State, dressed to the nines in elegant black, leading the dancers and the cheerleaders. She practically buried India under an avalanche of adjectives extolling its democracy, its potential for economic greatness, its responsible nuclear behaviour and its natural affinity with the United States. The way she spoke, one thought India and America were twins who had been separated at birth by the Wicked Witch of the East till now and the Warrior Princess had emerged from a Chevron oil tanker to unite the two.

Not everyone loves Condi Rice though. However, the man in the White House, who calls her 44, does. Why 44? Because he is president No 43 and his father was No 41 (they call each other by their numbers). The piano-playing lady, he thinks, is going to be No 44, oil gods and New York bankers willing.

One man who does not love Condi is African-American filmmaker Spike Lee, who has said of her, “I dislike Condoleezza Rice even more than Bush. She’s gotten a free ride from black people. African-Americans have to analyse her record and get past her pigmentation. I’m not going to vote for that woman, no way!” He believes she has betrayed her African-American roots, not that she cares what he thinks. She is a power player and unless the angels and ministers of heaven come to the world’s aid, she could well be the first black occupier of that white residence in the heart of this black city.

Is she a nice person? In an interview to Essence magazine in 2002, she said, “I was looking at the jewellery (in a swank store) and I asked to see the gold earrings. But the sales clerk kept showing me the costume jewellery. So I said, ‘No, I really want to see the nicer jewellery.’” Rice also told her, “Let’s get one thing clear. If you could afford anything in here, you wouldn’t be behind this counter. So I strongly suggest you do your job.”

Soon after Katrina hit, Rice went to New York and was seen shopping for expensive shoes at Ferragamo on 5th Avenue. A woman shopper noticed her and shouted, “How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!” Rice had her security detail physically show her out of the store.

Almost the entire Bush crowd, including the president himself, has been linked with Big Oil at one time or another. Rice, for instance, served on the board of directors of Chevron Corporation for 10 years. Chevron named an oil tanker after her, though some time later the company quietly renamed it “The Altair Voyager”.

Israel has seldom had a better friend in the White House than Rice. In a 2003 newspaper interview, she said, “I first visited Israel in 2000. I already then felt that I am returning home despite the fact that this was a place I never visited. I have a deep affinity with Israel. I have always admired the history of the State of Israel and the hardness and determination of the people that founded it… I am also the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and was brought up on the very moving stories of the Holy Land. They mean a lot to me.”

A commentator wrote after the publication of her gushy interview, “Rice may know something about Russia, her area of expertise, but when it comes to the history of Palestine and Israel she appears to be seriously misinformed. Rice is simply perpetuating the overworked myth of hardscrabble Zionists rising above the hatred of duplicitous Arabs.”

As for the Russians, they don’t care for her, although she speaks Russian. They think she still has a Cold War mindset. Some years ago, after she admonished Moscow over something, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Liberal and Democratic Party of Russia, said in an interview, “Condoleezza Rice released a coarse anti-Russian statement. This is because she is a single woman who has no children. She loses her reason because of her single status. Nature takes it all. Such women are very rough. They are all workaholics, public workaholics. They can be happy only when they are talked and written about everywhere: ‘Oh, Condoleezza, what a remarkable woman, what a charming Afro-American lady! How well she can play the piano and speak Russian! What a courageous, tough and strong female she is!’ This is the only way to satisfy her needs of a female. She derives pleasure from it. If she has no man by her side at her age, he will never appear. Even if she had a whole selection of men to choose from, she would stay single because her soul and heart have hardened. Like Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, or Alexander the Great of Macedon, Ms Rice needs to fight and release tough public statements on global scale. She needs to be on top of the world.”

Since I cannot improve upon former Comrade Zhirinovsky, I better stop right here before the State Department police comes and gets me.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

No one has expressed with more eloquence the loss of the dream that was Pakistan than Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Zard patoon ka bun/Zard patoon ka bun jo mera des hai/Dard ki anjuman jo mera des hai (A wilderness of yellow leaves/That is my land/A heap of gathered anguish/That is my land). Faiz is gone and as the poet Mushtaq Kanwal wrote in an elegy: Apni saleeb aap utha kar challa gya ( He went away, carrying his cross by himself). Faiz’s land of yellow leaves has gone yellower and there is no spring rain in sight that will green it. There has been quite no one who could be worthy of Faiz’s mantle. But he would not have been surprised because had he not written: Phir hameen qatl ho aayain yaro challo (Friends, the privilege once again has come our way to step into the execution chamber).

I think of Faiz as I look through the manuscript of a book on him, one of two, that Oxford University Press brings out this summer. There can be no two opinions: Faiz was a colossus. Few could equal his intuitive understanding of literature, religion and history and no one had the sweep of his imagination. And neither was any heart larger than his. Jo aye aye ke hum dil kushada rathtay hain (The doors of my heart are open, let he who would so enter). He felt the pain of the children of his own land, “Seekers of knowledge/Who waited at the doors of the powerful/In search of books to read, pens to write with/But who never came home.” And Faiz it was who wrote that moving lullaby for a Palestinian child.

I look through the editorials he wrote as the first editor of The Pakistan Times. Here is what Faiz writes on 13 September, 1948, two days after the death of Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah: “The Quaid-i-Azam has passed away, after long years of toil and sacrifice and service in the cause of his people, his frail body has at last been gathered unto rest and his soul called back to the abode of the eternally blessed. No name in the history of Indian Muslims has been loved and acclaimed as the name Muhammad Ali Jinnah. No man in living memory evoked such unquestioned loyalty, such unqualified devotion, such unbounded faith; for the one-time oppressed, rejected and broken Muslim nation, Muhammad Ali Jinnah was much more than a political leader. He was the father and the brother, the friend and the counsellor, the guide and confidant, the comrade and leader all combined into one. . . We can show no greater devotion to the beloved leader and give no greater proof of our loyalty to his memory then to base our conduct on the pattern that he has immortalised and to conduct ourselves in a manner that accords with his life-long preaching. From the great grief that envelops the nation today, must emerge a new courage and a new determination to complete the task that the Quaid-i-Azam began, the task of building a free, progressive and secure Pakistan, to restore to our people the dignity and happiness for which the Quaid-i-Azam strove, to equip them with all the virtues that the nobility of freedom demands and to rid them of fear, suffering and want that have dogged their lives through the ages.”

The dignity and happiness that the Quaid dreamt of for his people have not come their way. Faiz’s prayer remains unanswered, but I must emphasise that Faiz never gave up hope, even at the darkest hour of our history, 1977, the year of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s overthrow and the beginning of the decade-long black night of Zia-ul-Haq’s repressive rule. Was it not then that Faiz wrote: “We have waited at the door of hope for long/So we’ll wait for this moment to pass as well/And then we’ll stretch out our hands/Full of the shattered pieces of our dreams/And once again, we’ll start putting them together.”

On Iqbal’s 10th death anniversary – he died in 1938 – Faiz wrote, “Iqbal was not particularly enamoured of the type of homage that can only express itself in brick and stone and even during his lifetime the only memorial for which he ever expressed a preference was a chair in Islamic studies . . . Iqbal represented the enlightened synthesis of Eastern and Western learning, the best of our traditional literary culture and its modern modes of expression; the poet’s sensibility camped with the scientist’s aptitude for rational ratiocination. We can best pay homage to his memory, therefore, not by setting up lifeless monuments that cannot help us towards a better understanding of his verse and his message, nor by setting up institutions after his name that breed habits of thinking and feeling antithetical to his own. We can do it only by providing facilities for his cultural and social values to flourish. It is a matter for regret that neither the state nor the nation have paid much attention so far to cultural, literary, scientific or intellectual uplift, that in fact our traditional cultural values are being steadily vulgarised and the domain of our intellectual activity is being gradually usurped by plausible charlatans and half-baked obscurantists. To talk of injecting culture into a diseased, corrupt and moribund social organism is dishonest cant. Such an organism can neither conceive nor produce any culture – least of all the type of culture that Iqbal represented and taught.” What Faiz feared has come to pass. We have Iqbal; but his spirit and his passion for change lie buried even deeper than his remains.

In 1982, two years before his death, Faiz was asked, and he wrote a piece for The Ravi , the Government College student magazine he had once edited. Answering the question as to the role of an artist, he wrote: “My answer is and would be, we are the offspring, in the direct line of descent of the magicians and the sorcerers and music makers of old. In times gone by these ancient ancestors of ours, could make the rain come down with their incantations and with their songs, they could make the deserts bloom. And they not only implicitly believed that they had these powers, their community believed it too . . . This is because they found for the hopes and fears of their people, for their dreams and longings, words and music that the people could not find for themselves. And by blending their collective will to a desired end, they would sometime make the dream come true.

“So that is who we are, the inheritors of this magic and the power of this magic, in big ways or small, depending on the intensity of our love our hearts possess, on the anguish we share with an anguished world, on the measure of our strength to defy what is evil and to uphold what is good. And thus as a writer or artist, even though I run no state and command no power, I am entitled to feel that I am my brother’s keeper and my brother is the whole of mankind. And this is the relevance to me of peace, of freedom, of détente and the elimination of the nuclear menace. But out of this vast brotherhood, the nearest to me and the dearest, are the insulted and humiliated, the homeless and the disinherited, the poor, the hungry and the sick at heart.”

Faiz called Iqbal “the sweet-voiced mendicant who passed our way once.” So was Faiz. So was Faiz.

IH Burney, the George Orwell of Pakistani journalism, once said that one thing he would never do is to question anyone’s patriotism. He was troubled by the ease and frequency with which it was done in Pakistan all the time. You don’t like someone. Fine. No problem. Call him a traitor. Call him anti-Pakistan. Call him anti-Islam. Even better, call him an Indian agent. And if that is a bit heavy, the all-purpose, evergreen “CIA agent” epithet will do nicely.

Several years ago, when Russia was still the USSR, a friend of mine was told that he had been called an Indian, a Soviet and an American agent, all at the same time. “Take your pick”, he was told, “Such opportunities do not come everyday.” My friend chose to be a Soviet agent because he liked Russian women shot-putters. There is no accounting for taste in such matters.

I am reminded of these incidents because of what happened here the other day. Some years ago, the FBI or another cloak and dagger agency, decided or was told that there was an active terrorist-support cell in the small town of Lodi in California. A sting operation was mounted and ultimately a father and son, both American citizens of Pakistani origin, were netted in and accused of having Al Qaeda links. The son was said to have gone to Pakistan to receive training at one of those camps that our country is supposed to be dotted with, while the father was said to have financed the jihadi enterprise of his offspring. A Pakistani was used to trap the men.

When the case went to trial in a California court, a Pakistani academic Hassan Abbas, a former police officer who is in the black book of several of our gallant intelligence agencies, was approached by the court to act as an expert. He was told that the testimony would take 20 or 30 hours of work. (It took 130 hours). Abbas, whose book on Pakistan published last year displeased many in the establishment because it had exposed certain linkages between shadowy groups and those who are supposed to root them out, has since been dismissed from service and if he goes to Pakistan, there is little doubt as to what kind of official reception awaits him. As per standard operating procedure, Abbas’ family back in the home country has also been pressured.

Perhaps Abbas should have passed the invitation and not agreed to act as an adviser to the court, not the prosecution, but the court. But he did not. Given his extensive knowledge of the phenomenon of terrorism and how it has been allowed to grow in our backyard under the care and supervision of the very outfits and agencies that are supposedly fighting the scourge, Abbas was able to provide the court with competent advice. He says he answered the questions asked of him honestly, truthfully and in the interest of justice.

On March 26, Pakistan’s largest Urdu newspaper carried a highly tendentious report by its special correspondent (based God knows where) who called Abbas a “sultani gawah” or crown witness for the prosecution. The report also said that the government had called for a report. It was obviously a planted story and who its authors were is quite obvious. Such character assassination is deplorable. Unfortunately, it takes place every minute of the day, in the press and in people’s living rooms in Pakistan. In our country we may have a shortage of many things, but not of ill-wishers and character assassins. I recall that when I appeared in a BBC programme in 1980 on Pakistan’s nuclear programme, I was called an “Israeli agent”. Poor Israelis! I wonder how they manage to pay so many of their agents.

But to return to the Hassan Abbas affair, this is what he said in answer to my question as to what exactly he had done to be denounced in the mother country. He said he was not provided any information by the US government about the case; rather he was asked not to look up any recent news reports that may have appeared about the matter. The prosecution, he says, was very particular about the rules and regarding strict adherence to the due process of law. He says at times he wondered whose side the prosecution was on.

He told me, “They knew little about Pakistan and I was asked to first teach them everything about Pakistan — especially about religious political parties, their emergence and growth, the Afghan war and the rise of jihadi groups. I was given some books by the prosecution — all written by Maulana Masood Azhar (it was a painful exercise to read those books, give as they did an utterly distorted version of Islam.) Later, I was given a scrapbook maintained by one of the accused on the activities of the jihadi groups. I testified that I neither knew these people nor did I have any bias against them. The court was told that I had previously acted as an expert witness for defence, having testified in support of a couple of Pakistanis seeking political asylum. What I told the court was absolutely true and according to my conscience and understanding.”

The newspaper report in Pakistan also said that Hassan Abbas had written “anti-Pakistan” books and given “anti-Pakistan” lectures. All I can do is to ask Abbas to read Faiz. Banay hain ahl-e-havas muddai bhi munsif bhi: Kisay vakeel karain kis se munsafi chahain.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

It is amazing how little has been written by way of first-hand accounts of the tragic history of Kashmir. There is no dearth of books on the legal and political history of the dispute and the documentation available on the issue with the United Nations and the governments of Pakistan and India must run into hundreds of thousands of pages. Why the human side of this great and continuing tragedy is practically non-existent remains a matter of some amazement.

Some years ago, I persuaded a few to record their memories of Jammu. Although this is something I had been trying for years, though many promised, only a handful actually wrote anything. Memory fails and time takes its toll. I felt that one should publish what little there was rather than nothing at all. The result was a slim volume, first in Urdu, later in English. My esteemed friend, Rehmatullah Rad, my senior in years and in all else, who co-edited the book also recorded a moving portrait of the vibrant Muslim minority of that city, which like Rome, is situated on seven hills. In a foreword, Rad wrote: “It is now more than fifty-six years since we left Jammu but its memory still haunts us. While the day-to-day business of life goes on, the intense nostalgia for those stony streets and hills, of the homes in which we lived, of the gardens where we played, is only a heartbeat away.”

Rad was right perhaps when he wrote that the earlier generation which should have recorded its memories did not do so for two reasons. The first concern of its members in the new country, Pakistan, into which they had been pushed as refugees, was to survive, to find work, to settle down and to raise their families. “In the early years of partition, they also hoped to return to Jammu, a day that never came to pass.” About 200,000 Muslims of Jammu province were killed in 1947.

It was only recently that I came to learn of a 1947 memoir which Penguin Books in India published in 2005. It is called Kashmir 1947, A Survivor’s Story by Krishna Mehta. The author was married to Duni Chand Mehta, a member of the Kashmir civil service, who was posted as deputy commissioner of Muzaffarabad – Wazir-e-Wazrat in the State – in the summer of 1947. I asked M Yusuf Buch if he remembered Mehta because in 1947, Buch, freshly returned from the Aligarh, had been selected for the Kashmir Civil Service and posted as sub-divisional officer in the town of Uri. Buch, whose memory for detail is commendable, did not remember such a person. I asked my friend Tariq Masud in Islamabad, who retired from the Azad Kashmir civil service a few years ago, about Mehta. He has the one existing copy of the civil service list of the Jammu and Kashmir State, circa 1947, and he confirmed that indeed Duni Chand Mehta was the Wazir-e-Wazarat, Muzaffarabad, which was where he was killed in 1947.

With great expectations, I waited for the book to arrive from New Delhi and seldom has a book disappointed me more than Krishna Mehta’s. Those who record history have a duty to be truthful to the best of their ability. The book, it turns out, was first printed in Hindi by the Government of India under the title Kashmir par Hamla . An English translation was published in Calcutta in 1954 and fifty years later, it was reissued by Penguin. Krishna Mehta died in 1993.

Duni Chand Mehta arrived in Muzaffarabad in July 1947. Krishna joined him a month later. They had six children. When the tribal “raiders” arrived in the area, he was told, she writes, “You can’t fight single-handed against all of them and Pakistanis have come here in their thousands.” When the soldiers on duty abandoned him, he returned to his house. The family, she writes, had already been told to get out by servants turned hostile. He was accosted by tribesmen who “drew their guns at him and shouted, ‘You kafir , go on your knees and prostrate before us, we represent Pakistan.’ He stood motionless. ‘Tell us if you are a Hindu or a Mussalman?’ they demanded.” When he said he was a Hindu, “they all fired at him one after the other.”

Krishna goes on to provide a rambling account of her days in and around Muzaffarabad. She was not harmed, nor were any of her children, including two pubescent girls. This is a book without dates. There are the raiders who seem to be everywhere. She writes that her house was burnt to the ground, but she is later taken to the same house to live. On the one hand, everything the family owned is burnt down but things like ornaments and the like keep turning up. The man in charge is called “The Khan.” Her servants stay with her most of the time. The family is not starved, though there is always less food going around than she would wish. She does record several acts of kindness but generally, the Muslims are shown to be savages, keen to convert everyone to Islam. There is a character called “Rahamdad Khan” who is a big top among the raiders and who keeps a kind eye on her and her children.

When there are reports that the Indian army is arriving and Indian planes start bombing Domel, Muslims begin to leave Muzaffarabad. Krishna assures them that the Indian army would not harm them. When one man tells her what happened in Jammu, she says, “I don’t believe a word of this story about what happened in Jammu.” According to her, there were forced conversions. At one point she writes that the “Pakistan-occupied Kashmir authorities” were as much responsible for forced conversions as the locals. When “The Khan” leaves for good, he writes out a notice for her protection that is nailed to the door. It says, “No person, Hindu or Muslim, is to enter the house without permission. The offender will run the risk of the whole Kabuli area turning against him.” Kabuli??? She then receives a letter from him from “Bannu Kohat,” which she answers, but adds, “perhaps our letters were censored.”

She and her children are then taken to Rawalpindi, where they stay at Poonch House, before they are finally put on a bus, taken to Mirpur and jailed. On their bus, she recalls, is a “minister of Mirpur and his brother is the prime minister of Peshawar.” Finally, they are put on a train that takes them to India. Perhaps I am harsh on Krishna Mehta’s account. Those were nightmarish times when human beings turned into beasts. But how I wish she had written a book that could have done justice to her experiences truthfully. Perhaps not everyone should write a book. The original title of the book in Hindi Kashmir par Hamla betrays the prejudice of its sponsors. But one should let things be. Krishna Mehta is dead and if there is an afterlife, she is reunited with Duni Chand Mehta.

The Almighty Himself has provided the answer that some of us go looking for in vain elsewhere. How come we are landed with “leaders” whose prime concern is their own glory and who add insult to injury by doing everything they do in our name? Such men are imposed on us by way of divine displeasure.

Such dark thoughts have come to me on a bright Friday morning when the cherry trees are in blossom in Washington and crocuses and daffodils have sprung out of what until the other day was cold, hard ground. The birds have returned from their winter hideouts as nature stages its miraculous annual renewal.

What has bought on these dark thoughts is information from New York that Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz “Shortcut” is going to land at JFK come April 4 on a chartered plane at the head of a party of 40 plus for a meeting at the UN that has nothing to do with Pakistan. The number of men (and women?) he brings to the land of the free and the home of the brave is 40-plus at the time of writing but I am told that since the desire to serve Pakistan at Pakistan’s expense, preferably under alien skies, is particularly strong among our legislators and the brigade-size prime ministerial cabinet, the number could — and would — go up as take-off time in Islamabad approaches.

Why does the prime minister need to travel so much and with so many? When he came to Washington on an official visit, he brought with him close to 80 people, more than a few of whom had absolutely nothing to do and should never have come. The outcome of the visit and that of the meeting with President George Bush we yet have to see. But perhaps there were gains, one being that the prime minister was able to get to know the First Dog, with whom he expressed a wish to get acquainted when he stepped into the Oval Office. There used to be an old song “Love me, love my dog”, but it was not Mr Bush who was singing it on this occasion.

Those who were hoping that the long-awaited investment treaty with Pakistan would be signed, have since realised that they will have to wait some more, a great deal more. Edgar Allen Poe’s raven said “Nevermore”, so maybe that is what is in store for us regarding that investment treaty.

One must ask what brings our prime minister to New York? To attend a one-day meeting of a 15-member panel set up to study how the UN’s operational work could be carried out more effectively. This is one cup that should have passed the prime minister’s lips because what he first needs to do is to see how the country he is prime minister of can be run more effectively. A source in New York says that the UN Secretary General approached Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to join the panel, but was told that much though the offer was appreciated, the Indian leader’s first duty was towards his own country and there was so much to be done at home that he would not be able to take the time off. The response from Pakistan was a great deal of triumphant crowing in Islamabad from a certain encampment sitting on top of a certain Margalla hill.

Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz is going to bring with him on his chartered plane three of his ministers (I hope he knows their names since he has so many) and six members of the National Assembly, who should have said no as their primary responsibility lies towards their poor constituents who have sent them to Islamabad in the vain and never-to-be-realised hope that they will do something to lighten the burdens that are crushing them. The UN meeting will take place in one of the conference rooms in the basement of the building, which (the room) can accommodate no more than 30 to 35 persons.

I state this humdrum fact to show that not more than one or two of Shortcut’s so-called entourage will be able to go with him into the meeting. So the question is why and for what purpose and in the aid of what cause is he bringing so many with him? Wouldn’t it be more honourable to pay for such junkets out of his considerable private funds?

While the prime minister and his personal staff, whose number is sizeable, including a military secretary who is said to jump at everyone, will stay at the Millennium Hotel, across the street from the United Nations, the rest of his party will be putting up at Roosevelt Hotel. The daily rent for a single room at the Roosevelt is $259 compared with the UN-discounted rate of $219. I am unable to offer an explanation as to why everyone will not be staying at the cheaper hotel, except that the hoi polloi should be at an arm’s length from the chosen ones. And then there would be limousines to shop around in. A hired limo in New York costs an arm and a leg.

I must add at the end that the prime minister’s party contains six to seven members of what is called the “official media” and a number of mainstream journalists. I wish them a pleasant stay in the Big Apple since there will be nothing for them to report. Those who look askance at hard-working journalists availing themselves occasionally of such R&R deserve to be sent to Guantanamo.

And before I forget, two days after arrival in New York, Shortcut and party will fly off to Madrid. Will there be time to see a bullfight? If so, would it be possible to push some members of the party into the ring when the bull comes charging in?

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

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