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A story is told, and it happens to be true — that the general who cools his heels at 7,000 feet above the sea in Murree and who, apart from running his division, keeps an eye on Azad Kashmir, was upset because down in Muzaffarabad someone had been given a job without his permission. So down went a letter demanding to know on whose authority the appointment had been made. After some head scratching, the general was advised that the appointment had been made by “the competent authority”, which is how duly constituted government is officially described. Pat came the rejoinder, “The competent authority is hereby instructed to make no such appointments without the permission of this office.” Moral of the story: there is government and then there is super-government.

Our credentials for demanding the right of self-determination for the people of Indian-held Kashmir would be much stronger if the government elected to govern Azad Kashmir were truly autonomous. Regrettably, it never has been. Islamabad continues to hold the reins and call the shots. Since 1947-48, the two top civil service posts — that of the chief secretary and the inspector general of police — have been held by Pakistan-sent officers. Any Azad Kashmir president or prime minister who has tried to assert his authority has found himself out of power before long. Big Brother calls the tune, even though his reasons may be entirely well-intentioned and paternalistic. For instance, if the Azad Kashmir president or prime minister wishes to proceed abroad officially, the permission to do so has to come from Islamabad.

The other day, there was a conference on South Asia in Washington, where Dr Vijay Sazwal, a Kashmiri Pandit and an American citizen who runs the Indo-American Kashmir Forum, read a paper on Kashmir in which he quoted from records released by the British government about 10 years ago. He argued that any Kashmir solution would need to be not land-centric but people-centric. The papers show, he said, that while the British were generally supportive of the State’s accession to India, they believed that Indian control of the western borderlands would pose a grave threat to West Pakistan, which could lead to its balkanisation. At that time, the Whitehall and the Pakistan government were also discussing a military alliance that would maintain British military presence in the NWFP region because of lingering fears of a Russian incursion. Once the tribesmen went into Kashmir in October 1947 and insurgencies broke out in Poonch and some other areas, political directives from the Whitehall to British civil and military officers in the subcontinent were precise in stating that India should be denied full reoccupation of the State and a ceasefire should take place along a well delineated boundary that disconnected Indian Kashmir from Pakistan.

Sazwal wondered if Gen Pervez Musharraf’s concept of self-governance for Kashmir was based on the Azad Kashmir and Northern Areas model. Until 1974, Azad Kashmir had a presidential system, the president being an Islamabad nominee. The interim AK constitution was passed in 1974, creating the lower house and the AJK Council, which was to be presided over by the prime minister of Pakistan. Laws passed by the AJK Council do not have to be approved by the AJK Assembly, and they do not need the assent of the President of Azad Kashmir. However, laws passed by the AJK Assembly have to be approved by the Council and require presidential assent.

The Northern Areas are a part of the State but they have been directly administered by Pakistan since 1949. In 1972, the AJK Assembly passed a resolution demanding control over the Northern Areas but without success. It was not until 1993 that a full bench of the AJK High Court ruled that the administrative system of the Northern Area is arbitrary, and its governance should be handed over to the Azad Kashmir government. The Pakistan government challenged that order in the Azad Kashmir Supreme Court, which came out with a compromise decision in 1994, holding that “the verdict we reach is that the NA are part of the J&K State but not part of AJK as defined by the Interim Constitution Act of 1974.” Then there was the 1999 landmark decision by the Supreme Court of Pakistan, directing Islamabad to undertake new steps to improve the legislative, administrative and legal rights of the people of the Northern Areas. This has led to some improvements but far more needs to be done to give the people of the area their democratic rights. To this day, they have no representation in either the Pakistani or the Azad Kashmir legislature.

In a paper Sazwal wrote in 2004 about Indian-held Kashmir, he criticised the inefficient and corrupt manner in which the state had been run, while highlighting the plight of the rural areas where the condition of the people had not changed in 55 years. He concluded by pointing out that as much as the United States believes that India sees everything through the “Pakistani prism, America itself has a tendency to see everything from the “nuclear prism” in South Asia. He suggested that Washington should redirect its focus in the subcontinent and make Indian and Pakistani active participation in SAARC and the South Asian Free Trade Agreement its top priority. “Kashmir cannot bloom in isolation because there is no such separate country. On the other hand, if India and Pakistan become peaceful trading partners, there is every reason to believe that people from all regions of Jammu and Kashmir will find themselves in the midst of that trading boom. People will travel at will and fences and boundary will lose their significance. What wars and militancy could not achieve in Kashmir will become reality through peaceful coexistence and growing commerce,” he wrote.

The only question is: will it ever happen?

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Agha Nasir’s name is so inextricably associated with broadcasting and has been for so long as to have become one with the medium. Starting out with Radio Pakistan, Karachi, he was the kind of young talent that ZA Bokhari was adept at discovering. When television came to Pakistan in 1964, he had already made his mark as a broadcaster, producer and radio writer. He also became one of the new medium’s first producers. The facilities at Lahore, Rawalpindi, Dhaka and Karachi were basic but it is a tribute to the talent, enthusiasm and dedication of the generation of broadcasters to which Agha Nasir belongs that the new medium was able to establish itself and gain popularity in an amazingly short time.

I first met Agha Nasir in Lahore when he arrived from Karachi to join the fledgling Lahore TV station, which was a gift from NEC of Japan. The transmissions were brief but in a few months, Agha Nasir and his colleagues, led by Aslam Azhar, had assembled a team of writers and performers that included Kamal Ahmed Rizvi, Enver Sajjad, Shoaib “Puppy” Hashmi, Naeem Tahir, Muhammad Idrees, Sikander Shaheen and Naseer Anwar. Zafar Samdani, who passed away recently, was head of news during the initial phase and Muslehuddin, who had left APP to join PTV, was chief reporter. The deputy commissioner of Lahore was Mustafa Zaidi who had begun to write poetry under the name Tegh Allahabadi, while still a student.

Agha Nasir, who has always been a marvelous writer, published a book some years ago, which was a nostalgic flyback to years past. It recorded his memories of people he had known and worked with. He has just published another book, which is based on his recollections of people and places, some of which have appeared in newspaper columns. He writes, “What, till the end of my days I will consider my great good fortune is the number of eminent people I came to know and befriend during my time in Lahore. They included writers, poets, musicians, painters, filmmakers and cricketers.” Here is how he recalls some of them.

“I met Sufi Ghulam Mustafa Tabussum in the office of Lahore radio station director Shamsuddin Butt. Sufi Sahib was known all over the country for his marvelous children’s poems; he was also a renowned teacher of Urdu and Persian. When Faiz was unsure about some aspect of language or versification, it would be Sufi Sahib to whom he would go for guidance. Sufi Sahib wrote some memorable ghazals and he had no equal when it came to light Punjabi melodies or geets. During the 1965 war, he wrote exceedingly beautiful popular poetry, which bore his stamp. Nur Jehan’s Aye puttar hattan re nahin vikday is so moving that even today it brings tears to the listener’s eyes. Sufi Sahib was so full of life that he was always ready to go wherever there was fun to be had and friends to be met. He never acted his age and would be at the head of the group of younger people if something interesting was up, be it a party or something else. He became my friend from the moment we met and that was the way it remained till the last day of his life, when in 1977, I saw him off at the Rawalpindi railway station. “There is a child inside every man, but Sufi Sahib kept that child alive till the end of his life,” someone said of him.”

Few people would know that the PTV logo was designed by the great painter, Abdul Rehman Chughtai. It was Agha Bashir Ahmed, brother of Agha Abdul Hamid and painter Zubaida Agha, who was the Lahore PTV station director. He it was who requested Chughtai to design the logo. He agreed reluctantly on the condition that he not be rushed, but completed the assignment in a few days. The logo, Agha Nasir writes, is a rendering of a dancing peacock. The two wings of the bird were symbolic of the two wings of Pakistan. After 1971, some officials suggested that since one of the wings was gone, the logo should be abandoned. The suggestion was rejected when it was pointed out that if the two-nation theory was still alive, so was the PTV logo.

Agha Nasir remembers Nasir Kazmi, whom he first met through Muslehuddin, though he had once seen him at Jashn-e-Farid in Multan. When he walked in with Intizar Husain, his inseparable friend, Agha Nasir recalls Faiz Ahmad Faiz saying, “Here comes the literary duo of Nazakat Ali Khan-Salamat Ali Khan.” Nasir wanted to produce a programme for PTV to be called Night People ( Raat ke Log ). This programme was about those whose day begins when the sun goes down, people such as thieves, prostitutes, coolies, pickpockets, watchmen, beggars, drunkards and police constables. Nasir himself was one of those night people. Agha and Muslehuddin recorded his last interview from his dying bed. His last words were, “Greet the trees, flowers and birds of the city on my behalf.”

Agha Nasir has recorded a marvelous story about Mir Khalilur Rehman, founder of the Jang Group, who began life in New Delhi as an advertising salesman for a small Urdu evening paper called Musalmaan . On return from a visit to London, Zia-ul-Haq’s prime minister Muhammad Khan Junejo, angered by reports given to him by his staff, that his visit had received no coverage either in London or in Pakistan, began to harangue the press for its laziness and lack of responsibility. Among the journalists who sat listening to a prime minister getting angrier and more insulting by the minute was Mir Khalilur Rehman, who seldom spoke at press conferences, leaving that to his reporters. Suddenly, Agha Nasir writes, Mir Khalilur Rehman rose from his seat and screamed, “Enough is enough, sir!” Junejo was taken aback and stopped in mid-sentence. It was the first time that anyone had seen Mir Khalilur Rehman angry. “Sir, what are you talking about? You do not know the facts. All these sycophants surrounding you, they tell you nothing. Has no one told you that during your visit to England, we kept trying to assure the British media that you were a prime minister with powers and not the head of a puppet government? We even flattered them so that they would accord you some coverage, the kind they would accord to an elected head of government, but no one was prepared to believe a word of what we said. Has no one told you that we kept filing reports about your visit late into the night? But there was nothing in the discussions you held or the speeches you made that had anything newsworthy in it. Now you tell us, how can we turn those non-stories into headlines?” Junejo went red in the face and left the room without saying a word.

Through these reminiscences, I would say, Agha Nasir has preserved many precious stones that make up the cultural mosaic of our country.

That old campaigner, Sardar Abdul Qayyum Khan, the man who has seen it all, and then some more, came to Washington for a few days, a couple of which he spent having his heart looked at. His doctor, a Kashmiri to boot, found it to be in the right place, as it has been since those distant days when he led an uprising in his native Poonch against the Maharaja’s government. However, a few passages needed to be cleared of whatever it is that clogs them up with time, and that the dexterous hand of Dr Shawl accomplished with practised ease.

He pronounced Sardar Abdul Qayyum Khan in good nick and sent him home to friends, which was where some of us spent an afternoon talking to him. I asked him that when one looked around today in the politically divided landscape of Pakistan, he alone could qualify for the title of “elder statesman”. That being so, should he not attempt to bring about a grand national reconciliation between Gen Pervez Musharraf and the two exiled politicians. Sardar Qayyum answered with a story. There was a big public meeting in Dhaka, he said, where Sher-i-Bangla AK Fazlul Haq was due to speak, but he was nowhere in sight. Finally, someone brought the news that he was sitting in a graveyard. On being asked what he was doing there, the man who had had the historic honour of presenting the Pakistan Resolution at Lahore on March 23, 1940, replied, “Those who could lend me an ear are all resting here.”

Asked what he thought of the recent Kashmir Conference held in Washington where the sponsor, the Kashmiri-American Council, refused to include any reference to self-determination in what it grandiloquently called ‘The Washington Declaration’, Sardar Qayyum, whose political acumen and skill even Zulfikar Ali Bhutto acknowledged, replied, “If you take out the right of self-determination from the struggle of the Kashmiris, you are left with nothing. So how can you cast it aside?” When someone said that it was Dr Ghulam Nabi Fai who had seen to it that the final document issued by the Conference in controversial circumstances should carry no reference to self-determination, Sardar Qayyum smiled wanly and said, “What can I say? What Fai does is not on his own.” What he left unsaid is clear and it is time those who back operations that do a disservice to the Kashmir cause rather than advance it, were to re-examine their conduct and reassess their erroneous assumptions.

Sardar Qayyum regretted the stalling of the India-Pakistan peace process and urged both governments to resume the movement forward, which though slow, was movement forward nevertheless. There are elements on both sides which have a vested interest in the breakdown of the process, he cautioned. He said the Azad Kashmir government could only play a role supportive of the Pakistan government’s efforts. “We are an ideological base of the struggle and no cracks should appear in Azad Kashmir because Pakistan’s political and defence stability is tied to Azad Kashmir. Good relations between Pakistan and Azad Kashmir send a strong signal across the dividing line.”

Asked about the permanence of the Line of Control as a solution of the Kashmir issue, Sardar Qayyum replied, “How can a line of conflict become a line of peace?” When someone suggested that the Muslim League had sided with the Muslim Conference in the recent elections in Azad Kashmir, he replied that it was as it should be because the Muslim Conference and the Muslim League go back a long way. “We were a part of the Pakistan Movement that the Muslim League led.” He said India and Pakistan should come to an accord that the Kashmiris would find acceptable. He recalled telling Gen Musharraf in a meeting, “Anything that ensures the safety and well-being of Kashmiri Muslims should be accepted.”

Sardar Qayyum regretted that the Musharraf proposal about the demilitarisation of Kashmir had been rejected by India. The Indian army, he added, is an army of occupation and it will continue to be seen as such by the people of Kashmir. Asked about the Mumbai bombings, he said, “God alone knows who is doing that, but they must not be allowed to determine the fate of India-Pakistan relations. The leadership must take control and not let the peace process be thus hijacked.” He said if there is progress on the political front in Kashmir, militancy will go down. If not, militancy will continue and increase. He wanted the Kashmir borders to be genuinely softened and the movement of people and trade to be allowed without let or hindrance.

He said the water problem is going to assume grave proportions and it is time to realise that it will remain unresolved if there is no settlement of Kashmir. He called the Indus Basin Treaty of 1960 a mistake. Asked about the “new mantra” of “self-governance” in Kashmir, he replied, “Even municipal corporations have self-governance, so that cannot be a solution of the Kashmir issue.” When asked about the threat of “hot pursuit”, that some in India had talked about, he replied, “Those who do so live in a world peopled by the demented.” Asked about the Northern Areas, he said, “The constitutional position remains undetermined.” He did not agree that the Kashmir Council headed by the prime minister of Pakistan should be abolished, arguing that the Council ensured contact between the governments of Pakistan and Azad Kashmir “at the highest level”. He added, “If the Council goes, we’ll return to the time when a joint secretary of the Kashmir Affairs ministry lorded over Azad Kashmir.”

As to the charge that there had been rigging in the recent Azad Kashmir elections, he replied, “The surprising thing in our part of the world would be if no such charge is flung at the winners after an election.”

However, there are those who are convinced that the AK elections were a “dress rehearsal” for the 2007 elections in Pakistan. We will know in a year.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Why is it that most of us end up doing, not what we should have done, but something quite different? Since time flows forward, not backward, it is not possible to make course corrections by returning to the past. Were that within human grasp, most of us would choose to choose a road other than the one we took for reasons that in retrospect appear to be either wrong or accidental. Were time to be reversed, one person who would do something other than what he ended up doing would be Zafar Iqbal Rathore. While he should have been an academic, he spent his life in the service of the police.

A police officer Rathore was, but not the kind who would have passed muster with, say, Syed Qalandar Ali Shah, SHO, Thana Tibbi, Lahore, who believed that before you ask a question, you should flog the man being questioned with what in the old Punjab thana culture was called Maula Bux or chittar , a giant reinforced leather slipper, swung with the help of a stick that served as the handle.

Rathore stayed with the service, rising from rank to rank, but it was in books that his heart was. I think a good deal of what he earned he spent on books. If his friends wanted to give him a present, they give him a book. His home is not like a library: it is a library. What is more, his books are not furniture. They have been read, which is easier said than done because he has enough of them to sink a ship. Dr Ashiq Hussain Batalvi used to say that at some point in life one should stop reading and begin to write. While Rathore speaks rather than write his books, a great number of his ideas are reflected in a new book – An Inquiry into the Culture of Power of the Subcontinent – by young Pakistani academic Ilhan Niaz. It would do Pakistan’s ruling classes a lot of good to read it, although I fear they would be the very ones who would do no such thing.

Niaz writes that India and Pakistan are both experiencing crises of state. In India the crisis is not as severe in Pakistan, where the crisis exists in a much more aggravated state. In both cases, however, the ruling elite has failed to understand that improving the quality of governance requires reform of the executive function. The consequence is that in both countries arbitrariness, mismanagement, and corruption are rife, the rulers perceive the state as a personal estate, and the government is daily enfeebled and rendered more irrational. The Quaid-i-Azam hoped that Pakistan would improve and strengthen the embryonic legal democracy inherited from the British, establish the supremacy of parliament, and protect permanent institutions of state from the arbitrariness of the government. The State of Laws he envisaged could only survive if it refrained from identifying its authority with divine sanction or ideological certainties. Perhaps the most important institution bequeathed to Pakistan was the civil service.

However, the integrity of the civil service was undermined and arbitrarily subverted by every government, whether civil or military.

Niaz points out that successive leaders have not shown any inclination towards taking the steps necessary to ensure the bureaucracy’s autonomous functioning. The inability of the criminal justice system to discharge its functions with tolerable efficiency is highlighted by the fact that, in 1986, six out of ten prisoners in Pakistani jails were held pending trial, many of them on the basis of fraudulent first incident reports. The theocratisation of laws in Pakistan since the late 1970s has enhanced the discretion of the police, made it possible for them to become even more intrusive, and thrown the legal system into confusion not seen for more than a century. While Bhutto’s rule was arbitrary, Niaz maintains, General Zia’s eleven years in power witnessed the Pakistani State undertake a deliberate policy of medievalism.

The fact is that the ability of the state to perform its core functions continues to deteriorate, the district administration has been thrown into chaos by the local government “reforms”, the colonisation of the civil administration by the military is now generating immense resentment. The failure of national integration in Pakistan is in part due to its gravitation towards ideocratic arbitrary rule. The centre has repeatedly attempted to govern Pakistan as if it were a unitary quasi-imperial state and identified criticism of federal policies with treason. While The Quaid’s name is invoked everywhere and his sayings repeated ritually, his vision of a Pakistani State with Laws governed by a sovereign parliament in a manner consistent with British state morality remains as, if not more, distant today than it was when Pakistan’s founder addressed its first Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947.

Niaz points out that while General Zia manipulated religion in a manner that ancient and medieval rulers would readily understand, had a military coup not occurred in 1999 and had the Shariat Bill passed, Pakistan would have regressed to rule by an omnipotent executive legitimised by divine sanction. Even General Musharraf is obliged to keep repeating the mantra that Pakistan is to be a moderate, tolerant, progressive, Islamic State, without, however, elaborating how such an entity can be created when the writ of the government does not even run in large parts of Islamabad, the federal capital.

So what does Niaz suggest we do? According to him, reduced to its basics, the problem that afflicts the Pakistani state is its persistent inability to exercise power in a manner compatible with the dispensation of its core functions. This failure is principally a manifestation of the intellectual and moral inadequacies of the relatively Westernised elite of modernist Muslims that has ruled Pakistan since independence. The failure of this elite to exercise power with rationality, compassion, and regard for justice, eroded its legitimacy and rendered attractive the promises of fundamentalists to turn Pakistan into an Islamic utopia. The ability of Pakistan’s educated elite to think rationally has been further distorted by the American connection for the past two generations. The reason why there is very little hope of halting or reversing the drift towards ideocratic arbitrary rule is that the educated elite of the Subcontinent has lost the will to think rationally about the crisis of state or its own problems.

According to Niaz, the most recent vogue is that of promoting “good governance,” through providing non-government organizations, development organisations, and civil society organisations, with funds and training to develop participatory institutions and procedures. Several years, countless seminars at fine hotels, hundreds of thousands of pages, and hundreds of millions of dollars down the line, this latest panacea will be abandoned and replaced by an equally sub-rational programme of action without, however, having done anything to alter the fortunes of the state or its people. The historical experience of governance of the Subcontinent is replete with examples of ideocratic arbitrary rule, failed states, and failed societies. As the Subcontinent drifts towards these alternatives, it behooves its leaders to understand the central role of the culture of power in causing them to govern arbitrarily as if they were masters of personal estates, and appreciate, in the interests of their own survival, the historical link between the intellectual and moral qualities of civil servants and the executive, and the quality of governance in continental bureaucratic empires.

In other words, Ilhan Niaz reconfirms what Faiz Ahmed Faiz once said about the future of Pakistan, “ Bhai ye aisay hi chalta rahay ga .”

Yes, they are here. They waylay you, when you least expect it. Are they God’s spies? They certainly act as if they were. Are they the answer to the armed mullah or are they another throwback to times past? Are they the Muslim version of Bible-Belt evangelism? Are they political? Are they the Freemasons of Islam? Are they a sect or are they something else?

In short, all that you ever wanted to know about the Tableeghi Jamaat but were either afraid or too lazy to ask was in the public domain this week in Washington, when Dr Eva Borreguero, professor of political science at the University Complutense, Madrid, who is currently a visiting Fulbright Scholar at the Centre for Muslim and Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, spoke about the Tableeghi Jamaat at the US Institute of Peace. Pointing out that the Tableeghi Jamaat’s annual meetings in Raiwind, Lahore (thanks to the munificence at public expense of the House of Ittefaq) and Dhaka are the most well-attended Muslim gatherings in the world after the Hajj, she said the Jamaat’s unique modus operandi, which stays away from political activism and use of violence, has allowed it to spread discreetly and peacefully all over the world, finding minimal resistance from foreign governments.

The Tableeghi gathering at Raiwind, at which every politician, good and bad, in or out of power, makes a point of appearing (and getting noticed) ends with a prayer so long that it must even tax the Almighty’s patience, who has a great deal of other business to take care of. Prayer works, but it hasn’t worked for Kashmir or Palestine or for Muslims to see the light of reason. The mammoth prayer marathon is an astonishing scene where you can tell who the sinners are by ticking off those who are crying the loudest. That delightful poet, Abdul Hamid Adm, once wrote: Isqadar bojh tha gunahoon ka: Hajiyon ka jahaz doob gya (So laden with sins was the ship carrying the hajis that it sank).

Dr Borreguero, whose research was carried out in Pakistan, said that the ideological orientation of the Tableeghi Jamaat is Deobandi, which places its adherents into the ultra orthodox category. They would want society to be reconstituted on the lines of 7th century Arabia. That makes them a retrogressive, as opposed to a progressive, movement. The Jamaat has a loose but pyramidal organisational structure. Like the Masonic order, there are various levels and degrees of membership. There is no compulsion on joining it or leaving it. Members or volunteers receive no financial benefit and they are not asked to make a commitment. There are occasional Tableeghis and then there are 24×7 Tableeghis. Missions are undertaken both in Pakistan and abroad. Asked what she knew about the Jamaat’s finances, Dr Borreguero replied that it was difficult to know how they were raised or met, but it would seem they came through donations. The Jamaat operates no bank account, nor does it own property, except the Raiwind headquarters and grounds, thanks to Mian Nawaz Sharif, whose father was a great supporter of the Jamaat, just as he is. The green signs on metal plates that went up all over Pakistan — and still exist — exhorting people to do “good deeds” were put up by the Tableeghis and, I have little doubt, were paid for by the Sharif family. God has little interest in the topsy-turvey of politics, otherwise the hijacking of the Musharraf plane would have been executed successfully.

Asked if women play any role in the Jamaat’s higher echelons, Dr Borreguero replied, “None at all.” She recalled that the various Tableeghi women she interviewed in Pakistan had to seek their men’s permission before saying yes. She said the women observe the completest purda — hijab, niqab and even gloves so that their hands were not exposed in flesh. So obviously the Tableeghi Jamaat can be no revolutionary movement because under its aegis, women are strictly subservient and second string. The Spanish scholar said that the number of Tableeghis in France has grown form 5,000 a few years ago to 100,000. They are also very active in South Africa. The world headquarters are in India but the Pakistani and Bangladeshi chapters appear to operate autonomously. The Jamaat is non-sectarian and takes no side on any issue, political or otherwise. The membership is entirely Sunni. In North America and Europe, it draws in immigrants who have little knowledge of Islam and who are insecure or guilt ridden over living in a permissive society. The Tableeghis keep their message simple. They hope to transform society in some distant future through the “inner reform” of the individual.

The Tableeghi Jamaat is secretive and keeps no record of its inner meetings. One of its biggest supporters was former ISI chief Javed Nasir, whom most sensible people consider “over the top”. Former President Tarar is also a Tableeghi (how he squares that with that infamous trip to Quetta with a briefcase full of greenbacks, only he can explain). The Tableeghis do not believe in charismatic leaders, only in keeping a low profile. They are a transnational phenomenon, Dr Borreguero said. The life of a true Tableeghi, she added, is a “permanent ritual”. They believe in a “binary reality”. They view Muslims as being under the “threat” of modernisation. They don’t like Pervez Musharraf but for reasons different from those motivating Benazir Bhutto. The Tableeghis do not collaborate with other religious groups, but they don’t fight with them either. They do not support Jihadi Islam but they do not oppose it either. It has been argued that by not criticising radical Islam of the Al Qaeda type, the Tableeghis are indirectly lending it sustenance and support. After all, if you choose neutrality when the rights and wrongs of an issue are clear, you are, in fact, supporting the latter.

Yes, last but not least, the Tableeghi Jamaat, which came to birth in 1934, did not support the Pakistan Movement. Dr Borreguero was asked if the Tableeghis have a following in the Pakistan Army. “The lower ranks perhaps,” she replied, then added, “And maybe some in higher ranks.”

When a Tableeghi group knocked at Ahmed Faraz’s door and asked him if he could please recite the kalima, Faraz said, “Why, has it changed?”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Every year when August 14 comes around, I think of Zahur Azar, the man who made the first announcement from the Lahore radio station as Pakistan took birth at the stroke of midnight in 1947. This year, I have thought of him and that fateful night even more because in recent months, he has been quite ill. The good news is that he is on the mend, but it will take him a while yet to be up and about.

Last time I wrote about Zahur Azar and the first broadcast from Lahore the night Pakistan was born, I received a long, irate, even rude message from a retired Radio Pakistan man who accused me of having misrepresented facts. According to him, it was not Zahur Azar who made the first announcement, but Mustafa Ali Hamdani. Since that time, I have done some investigation and come to the conclusion that the honour of making the first broadcast from Lahore on 14 August does belong to Zahur Azar. It is very sad how even recent history has been distorted in Pakistan and events which are in living memory have been misrepresented, often out of ignorance, but at times knowingly. For instance, the number of people who have laid claim to being the Quaid-i-Azam’s “close companions” is so large as to make the claim a physical impossibility. With time, the number of such claims has dwindled, but the “close companions” still keep coming out of the woodwork, as it were. Even larger is the number of “workers of the Pakistan Movement.” Some “workers,” when you calculate their age, turn out to have been no more than two or three years old when the Pakistan Movement was in full swing, that is to say between 1940 and 1947.

Zahur Azar, who was director general of Radio Pakistan during the 1965 war, the only period in Pakistan’s history when the nation came together, has been living quietly in Islamabad. He has not claimed the credit that is his due. He lives alone, never having married, and remains one of the best read men I know. As a member of the Civil Service of Pakistan, he held a succession of key appointments, including secretary to the cabinet. His two great loves in life have been books and music. It was he who told me to my astonishment once that former President Ghulam Ishaq Khan is a great lover of classical music and once informed a meeting of officials that he had been listening the evening before to Gangoo Bai Hangal’s Maru Behag. Except for Zahur Azar, who is adept at classical music, no one else knew who Gangoo Bai Hangal was or what Maru Behag was.

But since we will be celebrating the 59th anniversary of Pakistan’s birth this month, let me recount the events of that first night of free Pakistan. The first announcement that the moment of Pakistan’s birth was at hand came in English from the Lahore station of what was still All India Radio. The announcement went on the air exactly five seconds before midnight on August 13, or at 23 hours 59 minutes and 55 seconds, and it was made by Zahur Azar. “At the stroke of midnight,” he said in his polished voice, “the independent and sovereign State of Pakistan will come into existence.” The text was written by Afzal Iqbal, who served in the Department of Films and Publications in the early years of Pakistan, and then went into the foreign service. He wrote several books and retired as ambassador. He died in 1996.

The English announcement was followed by twelve chimes of the studio clock. There was a dramatic pause and then Azar came on the air again: “This is Pakistan Broadcasting Service, Lahore. We now bring you a special programme on the dawn of Pakistan’s Independence.” The name, Pakistan Broadcasting Service, was the invention of the legendary broadcaster Syed Zulfiqar Ali Bokhari, younger brother of Prof AS Bokhari, Patras to lovers of Urdu. The change of name to Radio Pakistan came many years later and to Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation around 1968-69, I think. The third announcement came from Mustafa Ali Hamdani in Urdu. He said: “ Assalam-au-Alaikum. Ye Pakistan Broadcasting Service, Lahore, hai. Abb aap hamara khusoosi programme sunye. ” (This is the Pakistan Broadcasting Service, Lahore. Please stand by for our special programme.)

The Special Programme that followed began with the first two stanzas of Allama Muhammad Iqbal’s Saqi Nama sung by Fateh Ali Khan-Mubarak Ali Khan, the celebrated qawwals and scions of the gharana that was to give the world the incomparable Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. A short news bulletin, prepared by Hamid Jalal, Saadat Hasan Manto’s favourite nephew and historian Ayesha Jalal’s and painter Shahid Jalal’s father, followed the music. Hamid Jalal was assisted by Ghani Eirabie, who was to hold various key posts in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in later years and even work as Washington correspondent of Pakistan Press International during the 1980s. The news bulletin was read by the legendary Shakeel Ahmed in his deep and sonorous voice that remains unmatched. Even those who were not around in 1965 or too young to remember those seventeen days in September, are familiar with his stirring reading of war news. Every comic in Pakistan, Umar Sharif down, has cut his teeth on a Shakeel Ahmed-like rendition of how PAF planes used to execute their “ theek theek nishanay ” against Indian targets. When Shakeel Ahmed described PAF missions deep into India, you felt as if you were on in those birds with MM Alam or Cecil Chaudhri or Sarfraz Rafiqi.

To mark the 50th anniversary of Pakistan’s independence in 1997, an account of the first broadcast from Lahore was put together in a special programme called Aghaz-e-Safar – The Journey Begins. Written, produced and presented by Safdar Hamdani, son of the celebrated announcer Mustafa Ali Hamdani, it was after an idea by Saleem Gilani, one of the most inventive and distinguished of Radio Pakistan’s broadcasters, who discovered Reshma at a religious festival in Sindh and recorded her for the radio. It was also Gilani who set up the Radio Pakistan Transcription Service at Karachi. Zahur Azar recalled the memorable night of Pakistan’s birth in an article he wrote for Ahang , Radio Pakistan’s programme guide. Azar wrote, “In those days, very few people possessed radio sets. The transistor still lay somewhere in the future. Excited listeners thronged the homes and roof-tops of families which had a radio set, and waited for the magic moment of freedom at midnight to arrive. I often think of the gifted men who were associated with radio in those days. Let me name just a few who are no longer among us. ZA Bokhari was not only our Controller but also our Director General. His voice still echoes in my ears. It was not a voice: it was a miracle. We shall never hear the like of it again. Then there was Mahmood Nizami. A more delightful and impish spirit I have not had the joy of knowing in my entire life. He was one of a kind. Then there was Hamid Jalal, our News Editor, and Hafeez Hoshiarpuri, our Programme Executive. Our Chief Announcer was Mustafa Ali Hamdani. They are all gone, but they live on in my memory.”

I write this as my get-well card to Zahur Azar.

Yet another pointless Kashmir Conference has just ended in this conference-weary city, now suffering summer temperatures the like of which no one remembers having seen. A Pakistani doctor — yet another cardiologist — who has lived here for forty years says there never has been a summer like this one. Two more such summers and Washington may have to be renamed Jacobabad. Who knows, Al Gore may after all be right. The earth really is heating up.

If there is one thing Kashmir does not need, it is another conference. Had it been for conferences, Kashmir would have been free long ago. Nothing is gained by these vacuous, wasteful and self-defeating exercises. Hardly anything new is ever said at them or learnt. Governments, which hold Kashmir and the Kashmiris by the jugular, pay no attention to them, although it is they who finance them for the most part. Saadat Hasan Manto said it best: government is but another name for folly (Hakoomat himaqat ka doosra naam hai.) Why otherwise would government outfits pay for conferences, seminars and workshops to whose proceedings and outcome they have no intention of paying the least attention.

There have been more Kashmir-related conferences held by various Track II outfits than anyone can count between lunch and afternoon tea. What good have they done, except that they have afforded a variety of retired generals and civil servants the opportunity to broaden their minds and look up their grandchildren through travel to various cities! What strikes me as the most amusing aspect of these Track II (when all that matters is Track I) events is that some of their leading lights were once in positions where they could have done something to bring the suffering of the Kashmiri people to an end, or at least provided them with a measure of relief.

Track II conferences on Kashmir have had many backers; everyone, including Charlie’s aunt knows, about them. Some of them, notably the United States, could well have used its muscle and money to bring the Kashmir dispute to resolution. Why has it not done that? The last time the United States took an earnest and genuine interest in resolving the Kashmir issue was during President Kennedy’s time, although there are those who maintain that the effort was insincere, mounted only to get India off the hook after the 1962 military debacle at the hands of China. Once the situation was stabilised, US interest disappeared faster then the Cheshire cat, leaving not even a smile behind.

The Kashmir conference just concluded in Washington was mounted, as every year, by Ghulam Nabi Fai’s Kashmiri American Council, whose new letterhead bears a full colour image of the US Capitol dome with the American flag in the background. Who knows, next year, the name of the Kashmiri American Council may have changed to the American Council. Nothing happens just by itself. Logos don’t change unless the marketing people say so. What the Council tried to sell at this meeting this year, no Kashmiri can possibly buy. The final “declaration”, which it is not competent to issue since those attending had been handpicked and did not represent anyone except themselves, refused to even mention the words “self-determination.” This omission is not new on the Council’s part; it has done that more than once in the past. If you take “self-determination” out of Kashmir, what are you left with, the Council should be asked. The head of another sponsored Kashmir outfit (this one is in Brussels, if you please) read a paper on self-governance for Kashmiris. Not self-determination, but self-governance. Even municipal committees have self-governance, M Yusuf Buch has pointed out. Yasin Malik (where is he coming from, I have begun to wonder?) wanted self-determination to be kept out as he feared it would affect the India-Pakistan peace process. Peace process! That surely is a joke.

The links between the Council and certain sponsored Kashmir outfits in London, Toronto and Brussels are too well known for me for a listing here. It is time this charade was brought to an end and the agencies (or more accurately The Agency) masterminding them were to begin to concentrate on the work for which it/they were originally set up. It is quite clear that unless the “Invisibles” get out of the act, we will keep sinking deeper into the morass in which we find ourselves. The damage done, some feel, is already beyond repair, so let The Boys pick up their hats and their gadgets and leave by the nearest exit without saying goodbye.

The Washington conference, sixth in a row, has now become an annual feature, which may be good news for some who travel long distances to attend it, or the caterers and hoteliers who provide the required hospitality, but it does no good to Kashmir. The same people come — with some changes for the sake of variety — every year and say the same things they said the year before. More emotional adjectives are hurled about than are good for anyone’s health and when the talking shop ends, Kashmir remains exactly where it was and the Kashmiris exactly where they were — in hell on earth.

The best thing the organisers of these events can do is to donate the money spent on staging them to Kashmiri children. A Kashmiri doctor, who spoke at the conference, recalled the shocking state of Srinagar’s hospitals, which lack even basic facilities. Would it not be better to gift what is to be spent on next year’s Kashmir conference to a Kashmiri hospital?

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Sharifuddin Pirzada, the constitutional magician who can make any of its articles disappear with the wave of his wand, was once described as the Jadoogar of Jeddah by “Admiral” Ardeshir Cowasjee, an injustice that I hereby undo by anointing Pirzada as the Grand Houdini of Islamabad who breakfasts on constitutional provisions as if they were Fauji Foundation-produced cereal.

There are many who would rather see the last of him, not today, but yesterday; but he is not without his admirers. As long as unjust government lasts in Pakistan, Pirzada will not want for briefs. The man is brilliant. He finds loopholes where others see flat ground. He can get around laws without breaking them. And he always wins. After all, the governments that engage his services, do not do so because they love the sound of his voice but because he delivers. He is not the only lawyer in the Republic but it is he who bags the big legal briefs. I can predict that all this wrangle about Gen. Musharraf being able to or not being able to keep his uniform will be resolved through a novel formula nobody would have imagined was possible. Sharifuddin Pirzada will deliver yet again. Someone once described his as the Tara Masih of constitutional law. Few will disagree.

The only time Sharifuddin Pirzada has tripped is when he sent the entire country in shock by “disclosing” at a public meeting that Madar-e-Millat Miss Fatima Jinnah was murdered. There was such a countrywide uproar at this shocker that Pirzada drew in his horns and has not repeated the allegation since. On his last visit to the United States, he took me aside and repeated that Miss Jinnah had been murdered. I asked for evidence and how the accounts of those with first-hand knowledge of Miss Jinnah’s death could be refuted. I also told him that my cousin, KH Khurshid, who was like the son Miss Jinnah never had, was one of the first to arrive at Mohatta Palace after Miss Jinnah’s lifeless body was discovered in her bed. He had observed or reported nothing untoward. Had he found any evidence of foul play, as Pirzada was now alleging, he would have been the first to go public with it.

In order to reconstruct the tragic event, I asked my sister Sorayya, Khurshid’s wife, to transcribe everything she had learnt about Miss Jinnah’s death from Khurshid. What follows is her handwritten account that I have translated from Urdu.

“It took the Government of Pakistan many long years before it decided to celebrate Miss Jinnah’s life, her achievements and her service to the cause of Pakistan. Several books were published about her during the Fatima Jinnah year, but it is regrettable that some of the authors included uncorroborated and unproven accounts of her death in their work. Several of them said that she had not died a natural death and, in fact, she had been murdered. There were said to be injuries on her body and an inch and a half gash on her neck which had been sewn up. Her bed sheets were drenched in blood. The saddest thing to happen was that at a conference held in Islamabad to pay her homage, a worker of the Pakistan movement and a senior adviser to the Government of Pakistan, Sharifuddin Pirzada, declared that Miss Jinnah had been murdered in a brutal manner. This was a shocking claim. The first question that came to everyone’s mind was why Pirzada had kept silent all these years.

“To set the record straight on the basis of what KH Khurshid saw and reported to me, I would like to lay down the facts so that this regrettable and unnecessary controversy comes to an end. Miss Jinnah died on the night of 8 July, 1967. Earlier that evening, she had gone to attend the wedding ceremony of the son of Mir Laiq Ali of Hyderabad. When she returned, she sat on her lawn for a short while and asked for an apple which was brought to her and which she ate. Thereafter, she went into her bedroom. It was her habit to lock her door and at 7 a.m. the next morning, open her window, and throw down the key which the house bearer would pick up, unlock her door and bring her her morning cup of tea. She would then get ready and move to the dining room for breakfast. On July 9, the bearer found her window closed which surprised him because she was a creature of habit. He kept waiting for her to open it and throw down the key, but there was no such thing. As he stood there waiting, he was joined by Miss Jinnah’s washerman who had come with his bundle of clothes. Both men kept waiting for some more time for Miss Jinnah to appear but she failed to do so.

“Finally, the bearer phoned Lady Hidayatullah, a close friend who used to visit Miss Jinnah every day. As soon as she arrived, she realised that something was very seriously wrong and ordered the window smashed and entry gained into Miss Jinnah’s bedroom. Miss Jinnah was found sprawled on her bed diagonally. There was a peaceful expression on her face. I was in Sialkot with my parents and Khurshid was in Karachi waiting for the courts to take their summer break. He was about to leave for work when Lady Hidayatullah phoned him, asking him to rush to Mohatta Palace. He was the first to arrive after Lady Hidayatullah. A doctor was sent for who concluded that Miss Jinnah had suffered a fatal heart attack in her sleep. Khurshid told me that there was an inch long blue mark on her neck, which can sometimes be caused by a massive heart attack. The news of Miss Jinnah’s death spread like wild fire around the city and crowds began to arrive at her residence. Khurshid suggested to the Commissioner of Karachi, Syed Darbar Ali Shah, who was by then at Miss Jinnah’s residence that since the death was so sudden, a post-mortem might be in order. The Commissioner replied that he was receiving message after message from the capital that Miss Jinnah should be buried as soon as possible.

“A diary on Miss Jinnah’s bedside table was shown carrying instructions that in the event of her death, the following people should be informed: Lady Hidayatullah, Hassan Ishphahani, Matloob Hussain Syed, Hassan A Sheikh and KH Khurshid. By evening, the crowds had thinned. It was decided that the last rites would be performed the next morning. Miss Jinnah’s body was brought down and placed in the living room. No one was allowed there except those who were close to her, including her two nieces Zara and Gulshan. Khurshid thought one or both of them would stay in the house for the night but they said they had to get home and would return in the morning. After everyone had left, Khurshid alone remained in the room with Miss Jinnah’s body, sitting next to her and reciting from the Quran for much of the night. In the early hours of the morning, he lay down in a sofa and slept for a short while. The last rights were performed in the morning and she was buried close to her brother.”

These are the facts. The question that remains unanswered is why Sharifuddin Pirzada would come up with a story that is untrue. Anyone who knew KH Khurshid, the Quaid-e-Azam’s secretary from 1944 to 1947, would testify to his courage, honesty and devotion to the Quaid and his sister. No power on earth would have kept him from speaking up, had there been the least evidence of foul play. It is time, therefore, for Sharifuddin Pirzada to apologise to the nation and for others to let the real First Lady of Pakistan rest in peace.

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