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There were no signs of global warming in several parts of the United States in the last couple of weeks with Arctic winds practically lopping off your ears and nose if you happened to be out on the street while they were blowing merrily. All that is bad and can descend from heaven, did descend on Washington, which is more South than it is North, with generally mild winters.

Not only did a good deal of snow fall but also sleet, which is an unpleasant mixture of rain and snow and then that most dreaded thing fell on us, called freezing rain. The rain freezes as soon as it hits the ground. One foot out and off you go skidding. If you are lucky you break no bones, but only suffer bruises and contusions, which take the rest of the year to heal.

The residents of the capital have little sense of humour, being the only part of the United States which is taxed by the federal government but whose residents have no representation in Congress. The District of Columbia has often been called “The Last Colony”. It is ironic that the motivating principle of the American Revolution — no taxation without representation — should have been denied to the residents of the capital of the Republic.

Washingtonians are, therefore, and understandably too, somewhat cynical. They also have to put up with thousands of politicians who emit more hot air in and outside the halls of Congress than leaves the outer extremities of that eternal inferno which is supposed to await the wicked in the next world. Additionally, the people of Washington have to suffer the presence of thousands of lobbyists and lawyers, two breeds that a man would be wise to stay away from. On top of that they have a city government that has failed to repair any of the capital’s potholed streets, clean up its ghettos, provide proper policing or remove trash in good time.

The city fathers, it has to be admitted, believe in God and nature since they have let them take care of the snowed-in streets and the snow-piled sidewalks this year. The weather turned mild last Tuesday night and it has been getting progressively milder, which is what has taken care of the snow. It has begun melting and some streets now have enough water for a child to swim in.

Ah! I forget to mention that we also have the additional distinction of being the crime capital of the United States. You can be mugged within a block of the White House, especially at odd hours. Whereas a city like New York is alive and bustling with life at all times of the day and night, downtown Washington goes dead at the end of the business day. Offices close, lawyers go home after having fleeced the needy for much of the day, lobbyists return to their wives or mistresses, and the big stores and even the smaller outlets bring down their shutters.

Within a few blocks of the White House, the homeless stretch out their beds or what little the poor men have to lie on, and pray for the arrival of milder weather. Lafayette Park, which lies bang in front of the President’s residence is full of hangers-on, panhandlers and homeless people. The White House exit of the MacPherson Square metro station on 16th Street is a favourite shelter for some of the District’s homeless, as is the Farragut North metro station on Connecticut Avenue.

I find it ironic that just a block away from this metro station lies one of Washington’s oldest and most elegant hotels, the Mayflower (Pakistani VVIPs and their retinues have stayed there on occasions, though Shortcut, when he was here last, opted in favour of the equally elegant Four Seasons Hotel in pricey Georgetown). A block north of the Mayflower is Burberry’s where a shirt can be bought at the bargain price of a hundred dollars. As for suits and more substantial attire, the price is higher than what an average store clerk makes in a week.

Mercifully, we have not had much VIP traffic from Pakistan, except Prof. Atta-ur-Rahman who speaks without notes and can go on speaking without notes till the cows come home. He told some of us that in the universe everything is indestructible (except unrepresentative government in Pakistan, I suppose). Nothing goes away or ceases to be; it just changes form and shape. Ultimately, he said, everything turns into the same material of which stars are made.

“We are all star dust, just think of it,” he said. One should not question accomplished scientists and Fellows of Royal Society such as Prof. Rahman but I did not want to let the opportunity pass, so I asked him if Mr Sharifuddin Prizada was also made of stardust. “Do you want me to say ‘Regrettably, yes,’” he asked. I thought it best to leave the matter at that. But I have been wondering since. Prof Atta-ur-Rahman must be right because only someone fashioned out of such heavenly material could have thrived in as many regimes as the Jadoogar of Jeddah has.

But to return to Washington, we get more than our fair share of important visitors from back home, especially in good weather. Year after year, the few Pakistani correspondents who report for home papers from here have asked the venerable Embassy of Pakistan if it would kindly inform us of the arrival of the great ones from Pakistan and every time we are promised that it would be so, but seldom if ever does that come to pass. Half the time, we learn that one of our great men or women was here, conferred, ate dinner with the ambassador, checked out the Big Sales and has already winged his or her way home, stopping en route in London for a visit to Oxford Street and then in the Holy Land for the good of the soul and the remittance of sins.

I suppose we should not come down hard on our embassy. What good is an embassy if it fails to keep its cards close to its chest. “My doors are always open,” an ambassador who is no longer here, once said. What he did not say was that he was never in.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

A certain Dr Saheb has been preaching a particularly aggressive version of Islam for as long as one can recall. Obviously, there are those who buy what he hawks and feel that in so doing they have joined God’s army of the faithful. His recipe for all that ails the Ummah is the re-establishment of the Caliphate. He has not said so but I am sure that if that came to pass, and were Dr Saheb to be asked if he could do the honours by leading the community of the faithful, he would accept that onerous responsibility with the greatest pleasure. In fact, he has been waiting for it all these years.

Where else but in Pakistan will men like Dr Saheb, Gen Saheb and others get to publish their thoughts in newspapers? In his latest foray into print, Dr Saheb says – and in English to boot – that we have breached our covenant with God – of which accord no doubt he considers himself an eyewitness – and failed to make Pakistan “a lighthouse for the world at large.” Instead, our pursuit of “worldly gains,” he points out, “made us a hypocrite people, a nation of liars, which no one wanted to trust or rely upon. The more that one among us became eminent and powerful the more he was considered a liar and a cheat. We became hypocrites both at an individual as well as national level.” I am quoting him verbatim.

And what are the good Dr’s views on 9/11? “In order to entrap the Muslims and to destroy or occupy them, Israel staged the 9/11 incidents and cunningly diverted blame to non-existent ‘Al-Qaeda’ with the use of powerful media. The name of Al-Qaeda was first heard from Mr Bush on 9/11. Accordingly, Pakistan was threatened to become a frontline state against Afghanistan, to which threat our government surrendered after a single phone call from the Pentagon and took a U-turn against a Muslim country.” This about sums up his worldview. The point need not be laboured.

Such banshee calls for self-destruction keep getting sounded from a certain category of men who unfortunately lurk in the columns of most of our newspapers. However, Pakistan is not entirely de-peopled of sane and liberal voices. One such voice is that of Mian Asif Rashid, a young man from Multan who has just published a book of essays titled Daleel-e-Sehr or evidence of the dawning day.

He writes that the ejection of religious minorities from the body politic, has only resulted in depriving society of tolerance and largeheartedness. Ultimately, it was this lack of inclusiveness and the promotion of religious intolerance that led to the breakup of the country in 1971. The pursuit of this policy also played havoc with the flowering of democracy and the growth of a secular culture.

The author calls Pakistan a living example of neocolonial thinking. The army and the bureaucracy took control of the organs of the state. The Quaid was a titan and a committed democrat. Had his health permitted, he would have laid the foundations of constitutional government. But that was not to be. After the death of Liaquat Ali Khan, Ghulam Muhammad, a power-hungary operator, ensured the strangulation of democratic rule by setting in place a bureaucratic state. He also brought in the army as a political actor. It did not take the soldiers long to take control of the state, setting into motion an unending succession of military regimes.

Rashid writes, “We live under the shadow of a strange oppression. We neither have the freedom to think nor the freedom to act.” If you want to branch out on your own, you are stopped by your parents, followed by society itself which blocks your way. Or the government declares as unacceptable what you are trying to do. Sometimes, it is the interpreters of religion who pontificate that your actions are violative of Islam’s edicts.” Rashid finds Pakistani society unwilling to permit dissent. Even those who consider themselves liberal and secular suffer from a host of inhibitions. Key state positions are held by people who consider a secular outlook worse than atheism. The mullahs link secularism with Western conspiracies against Islam and denounce those whom they consider secular in outlook as enemies of God and foreign agents bent on corrupting the faithful.

Rashid points out that none of the three great revealed religions has favoured or recommended any particular state model. The Quran is silent on this because it expects men to fashion a system that best suits their times and the needs of those times. The letters the Prophet of Islam (PBUH) sent to various rulers invited them to embrace Islam but made no mention of what form of government or state they should have. Rashid maintains that in their own best interest, religion and state should remain apart. “If religion is separated from politics, it will not weaken religion because religion’s true power lies in the faith of its followers, not in its backing by the state. When the state opts in religion’s favour, religion becomes subservient to the state, which dilutes the respect in which it was popularly held.” This is quite true and we saw it happen during Zia-ul-Haq’s time.

Rashid, writing about Maulana Maudoodi, points out that it was he who transformed Islam into political Islam and he also was the first to call Islam a revolutionary movement. No such case was ever made before in any of the classical texts of Islam or theology. By using the rhetoric of the 19th and 20th centuries, Maudoodi laid the foundations of political Islam. However, when the Jamaat Islami found that there was no popular backing for Maudoodi’s teachings, it got directly involved in politics, while making little or no mention of social justice and elimination of material inequality. He quotes Hanif Ramay who once wrote that the Jamaat was a terrorist organisation wearing the mantle of peace and anti-communism but its real purpose was to establish an exploitative capitalist and feudal system in the sacred name of Islam.

Rashid is forthright and it occurred to me while reading his book that so reactionary has the intellectual atmosphere in Pakistan become that I doubt if any of our national Urdu dailies would risk publishing what he writes. In a chapter titled ‘Conformism,’ he writes, “One principal reason for the fall of the Muslims lies in their having killed the spirit of free inquiry in their societies and instead begun to worship retrogressive tradition and conformism. Intellectual freedom has been denounced as irreligiosity. In times of intellectual decay, people instead of exploring new avenues of knowledge, begin to pore over intricate interpretations of abstruse theological issues. Anyone who faults mullahs and clerics for their lack of enlightenment, is damned by them as a kafir, a man who is disrespectful of the Prophet, and one who refuses to accept the authority of hadith. If the person thus attacked survives the onslaught, he is denounced as a communist or a secularist who is in denial of Islam.”

Mian Asif Rashid’s book, which is made up of various essays, is heavy going but it may have pointed out the direction in which we are going to have to move if the present challenges facing Islam and Muslims are to be met.

I have received a mail from Sir Geoff in Lahore, who has been trying to talk the Lahore High Court into granting his habeas corpus petition in favour of Dr A Q Khan. He might as well try to lob a ball at the moon. Sir Geoff, who wants journalists to be journalists and not “keera makoras,” has directed me “for Godssake show some humour” not issue fatwas.

I have been trying to recall when I last issued a fatwa but memory fails me. Could it be the cold because here in Washington, we have been trying to survive what hopefully would be the parting kick of winter (who says there is global warming!)? Anyone who is trying to keep warm is not known to exhibit or even any longer possess a sense of humour.

It may well be asked why we have been braving the cold. After all, sensible birds, animals and people stay indoors drinking tea when it is freezing outside. So why not us? By us, I mean the handful that write for newspapers back home. The reason that we have been challenging the elements is Prof. Atta-ur-Rahman. There is no peace for the wicked when a minister from Islamabad is in town. The Prof is something else. He can rattle off facts, figures, statistics, the name of every chemical compound known to science and even the time of day without notes. He told some of us that in his entire life he had never read a speech from a script. He said he always knows what he is going to say and he says it.

This week, he spoke for three quarters of an hour at the American Association for the Advancement of Science and rattled off more facts than I would care to know in the next three years. By the time the Prof is done, Pakistan would be a country of PhDs, most of them without a job. But that will not be his fault. No one should expect him to do everything, especially when all the fake universities he has put out of business are out to get him.

But to return to Sir Geoff, let me regale him with what the tabloid World Weekly News, whose declared policy it is not to publish the truth, informed personal computer owners the other week. Walt Sasser, a techie, found that his computer’s cooling fans would spasm every few minutes, coughing out little blasts of air. Then something scrambled the machine’s text-encoding sub-routines. A message popped up on the screen saying, ‘Systeb Error! You will lose all udsabed idforbation.’

He had never seen anything like it. Walt’s friend Peter Lenart, who was summoned for help, discovered the cause of the malfunction. The computer had caught a human virus. It turned out that Peter’s nano-technology experiments involved viruses able to bind with particles of silicon. The bugs in Walt’s computer represented a similar strain. Once inside the chips, each virus’ protein coat had become covered with silicon particles. The gilded viruses became tiny electrical conductors, effectively rewiring the processors. As a result, the computer suffered from amazingly human symptoms. The speed of the computer increased and it was found running a high fever. It had also developed a runny nose. So Walt bundled the computer in a wool blanket and stuck a thermometer under the CD-ROM tray to monitor overheating. He made sure that the ailing machine got plenty of Sleep Mode. Within a week, the machine’s fever burned off the viruses. So, Sir Geoff, watch that PC of yours on which you type with one finger and don’t let any cats get into the room. Computers don’t like cats and can also catch their infections. And keep those writs flying.

And here is one from another American publication called The Onion. The report datelined Baghdad says: “US troops stationed in Iraq hailed an unannounced and unaccompanied visit Monday from Barney, the senior White House dog who belongs to President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush. Barney was escorted by troops at the Baghdad air base. Landing in Baghdad’s Green Zone amid extremely tight security, the Scottish terrier met with nearly 800 troops at a military mess hall, then visited Camp Victory, the US military headquarters on the outskirts of Baghdad. In both locations, the 6-year-old First Dog was greeted with loud cheers and standing ovations by servicemen and women.

‘Barney’s visit really cheered us all up,’ said Army Spc Anthony Udall, who was given the privilege of escorting Barney across the airport tarmac. ‘I can’t tell you how great it is that the White House would send one of its own to spend some time with us out here.’

Although the dog was in Iraq for less than a day, he maintained a busy schedule while there. Events included handshakes with top US field commanders, a tour of the base’s new recreation facility, and a ride in an armored vehicle. Besides sitting and staying at a military briefing, Barney also participated in the ground-breaking for a new visitors’ reception centre at Camp Victory, during which he energetically dug alongside camp officials.”

Barney, readers of this column will recall, is the self-same animal whom ‘Shortcut’ wanted to meet when he was at the White House last year. That left President Bush even more confused than he normally is, since he was under the impression that “Shortcut” had come to meet him. But to return to Barney in Baghdad, according to The Onion, the following was his schedule of engagements: 8 am Morning walk with generals on the ground. 9 am ‘Sit-down’ with troops. 10:30 am Game of catch. 12 pm Lunch, photo ops. 1 pm Bathroom break. 1:05 pm Moment of silence for fallen soldiers. 2 pm Treats.

I hope these two stories have brought a smile to Sir Geoff’s high court-harried mug.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Some people write autobiographies, others attempt biographies. Then there are those who do neither. They are the collectors. The only person I know who has made it a lifetime literary pursuit to read autobiographies and write about them is Parvez Ahmed Perwazi, a professor of Urdu, who, starting out at Talim-ul-Islam College in Rabwah, went on to teach in Japan and Sweden.

Currently, he lives in Toronto but let me warn those in Pakistan who write autobiographies that they should not consider themselves safe from Perwazi’s sharp, critical, scrutinising eye and his long reach. I was impressed with his reach and his abiding interest in this genre when he called one day to say that he had found certain serious factual errors in Tajammul Hussain’s Jo Bachhay hain Sung (that I have just translated into English for publication in Lahore). That only confirmed my long-held suspicion that Perwazi maintains spies in Karachi and Lahore who keep him not only informed of newly published autobiographies but supplied with them as well. While conceding to the old Persian saying that to identify errors committed by your elders is in itself an error, Perwazi nonetheless did catch Tajammul Hussain, who had written that Justice Boota Singh (not Justice Teja Singh) was named on the Radcliffe Boundary Commission as the Sikh representative. Perwazi also pointed out that the author had failed to mention that the Congress nominee was Justice Mehr Chand Mahajan. The author, Perwazi went on to say, had erred when he had Bhola Bhai Desai presenting the Congress case, whereas it was Motilal Satloovad. The Sikh case was presented by Sardar Harnam Singh, a leading Lahore lawyer. In other words, Perwazi had Tajammul Hussain both caught and bowled.

Perwazi has just published a book ( Pusnawisht aur Pus Pusnawisht , Naya Zamana Publications, Lahore) that will spare those who read it the arduous task of reading 151 autobiographies that the author examines and comments on. Writing about Quarratulain Hyder’s marathon Kar-e-Jahan Daraz Hai , Perwazi quotes Ijaz Hussain Batalvi, who in a review of her first book for Saqi , quipped, “After reading this book, it appears that before departing from India, Lady Mountbatten left the English language in the author’s custody for her short stories.” After Ghulam Muhammad’s death, she and Batalvi went to see Qudratullah Shahab at Governor House, Karachi and found him busy writing. “Ghulam Muhammad,” he told them, “was one of God’s chosen beings.” “That’s the problem,” Annie shot back. “We’ve all become God’s chosen beings.”

Perwazi faults Shahab’s Shahabnama on several counts, most of them factual, one being the author’s assertion that when on April 17 1959 he was asked to rush to Lahore by Brig. F.R. Khan (who had become the information czar of the new military government) for an “important assignment,” he did not know what it was. Perwazi proves that Shahab did know what he was going to Lahore for, namely the takeover of the Progressive Papers Ltd. One should add that Shahab does not admit that it was he who wrote that notorious Pakistan Times editorial “A new leaf” after the shameful annexation by Ayub of Pakistan’s only leftwing group of newspapers. In his assessment of Rashid Ahmed’s Siddiqi’s Aashufta Byani Meri, Perwazi quotes the famous Aligarh professor and writer as saying that when he went to call on Allama Iqbal for the first time in Lahore, he was “taken aback by his Urdu accent.” Then he adds, “How unauthentic the language sounds if it is spoken in an uneven accent!” This kind of snooty observation is typical of a certain class of “bearers of the language.” Even Iqbal, the supreme master of Urdu and Persian, is found wanting because he speaks Urdu with a Sialkoti accent. Faiz once said to me that there were those who did not even consider Iqbal a poet.

Hameed Naseem’s Namumkin ke Justaujoo comes in for praise, although Perwazi does feel irked by the author constantly reminding his readers of his master’s degree in English. The book, which is written in the third person, credits Dr M.D. Taseer with being the author’s true teacher and mentor. Hameed Naseem was his student at MAO College, Amritsar, where he also came to know Faiz, Rashid Jahan and Sahibzada Mahmoodul Zafar, her Marxist husband. Chaudhri Zafrulla Khan’s marathon Tehdis-e-Naimat deserves the attention that Perwazi accords it, summing up his tribute in these words: “It will remain a unique autobiography because it is peopled with the names of eminent world leaders whom the author came to know personally. No other Urdu book can claim that distinction.” One such eminent personage was the King of Bogonda, a Cambridge man whom Zafraulla met in his palace and found that no one could enter his presence unless he came crawling along the floor. The Cambridge-educated young king seemed to have no problem with that.

Assessing Kishwar Naheed’s Burri Aurat ki Katha , Perwazi writes, “This is not only Kishwar Naheed’s story but the story of all those unfulfilled and exploited women who suffer oppression at the hands of their men, their society and its tradition, but their lips remain sealed. But Kishwar Naheed is a woman who speaks out and when a woman decides to do that, no one can silence her.” Perwazi refers to the late Ahmed Bashir, though he does not name him, who wrote a scurrilous profile of Kishwar, but when he spotted her on Lahore’s Mall one day, he tried to slink away, pretending that he had not seen her. Kishwar, never one to let go, chased after him, grabbed him by the collar and said, “If all that you have written is truthful, why are you hiding your face now?” Perwazi writes, “Had Kishwar not written this autobiography, we would have been greatly disappointed, not only we, but all those who want to say that the king wears no clothes but are unable to do so. But they do want that someone else should say that. Also disappointed would have been those 13- and 14-year-old girls of East Pakistan whose young breasts (in Kishwar’s words) ‘had yet to begin breathing though their bellies contained eight month old babies, subjected as they had been to the animal brutality of government hoodlums.’ Also disappointed would have been those who listen to the ravings of mullahs but do not have the courage to speak up.”

Perwazi, writing about Gen. Atiq-ur-Rehman’s autobiography, Back to the Pavillion, narrates a delightful story. When the “Turk,” as he was known in the Pakistan army, was commanding the 15th Division at Sialkot, he stopped his car while driving home because a soldier had failed to salute him. He awarded the erring soldier the spot punishment of six baithak that involves a person going down on his haunches, rising to his full height only to go down again. After the soldier had obeyed the “Turk’s” command, he pointed out that the GOC’s car plate, bearing the stars of his rank, had been covered so he had no means of knowing who its occupant was. In that case, the “Turk” stated, both my driver and I would take the punishment that I earlier awarded to you, which was exactly what they did on the side of the road.

But generals like the “Turk” are gone. What we have in their place, I leave to the imagination of those who have read this far.

In some ways, one of the worst things to have happened to the Pakistani community living abroad is the availability of Pakistani channels on satellite television.

The essential programme package of the two most watched ones is made up of soap operas, religious programmes, music videos and news. The soap operas or dramas, as they are called, have the largest viewership, much of it constituted by stay-at-home women, who have little else to do besides their household chores. I have yet to hear of a drama serial that did not revolve around the theme of marriage. It would seem that the only issue Pakistan faces is the issue of finding the right match.

The dose of religious programming is a heavy one. The only religion that engages the attention of Pakistani networks is Islam. There is not even a passing mention of any other religion. Millions of Pakistanis are not Muslim. A sizeable number is Christian. Well, they might as well not exist. While the rest of the world has come to believe that interfaith understanding is the key to a more civilised world at peace with itself, that message has yet to reach Pakistani TV channels beamed at the world.

The religious programmes are so dark and grim that one would have to have strong faith to remain in the flock after watching them. There you have these people, masquerading as divines and theologians, as authorities on the word of God and all that has been revealed to man. They never smile. They only deliver themselves of chilling warnings to those who stray from the path, a path that they credit God with having laid down, but of which the Almighty is quite innocent.

The issues they debate and yap about are so abstruse and so utterly irrelevant to life as people live it that one wonders what distant planet these men have come from. I have seldom if ever heard any of them speak about things that would enable us to live better lives in the here and now. You hear them either recounting stories from centuries gone by or terrorising their audience with the punishment that awaits them in the hereafter. Since God is just, there is little doubt that the tortures of hell that they threaten the rest of us with, await them instead for the harm they have done in this world to people emotionally, psychologically and spiritually.

Only this week I was listening to a maulana with a flowing beard delivering a lecture on the shameless women of the West and their barely-covered bodies which drive men mad with lust and lechery, destroying them morally and spiritually. He was warning that the same thing was beginning to happen in Pakistan because women no longer covered themselves according to the way ordained. Their immodest attire, which he called a Western imitation, generated sin and promoted lustful feelings in men. I should add that he referred to a verse in the Quran which he claimed supports his view, when it does not.

Why are these people obsessed with women and their uncovered faces? If they were really as virtuous as they make themselves out to be, they would not look at women who were walking around with uncovered faces. But they are obsessed with sex and their minds are full of the most unholy thoughts.

Then there is the now established TV practice of having mullahs from different sects on the same programme to debate one another. Could there be a more effective way of dividing the Muslims? The Pakistani channels beamed abroad also telecast the call to prayer five times a day. Those who pray regularly do not watch television at the appointed hour. They know the hour when they have to pray. So for whose benefit is this done, one wonders!

And what about news? Despite the fact that these channels operate the same equipment and have the same technology as, say CNN or BBC, their news bulletins remain radio news bulletins. There hardly ever is any actuality. You are shown pictures of the president, the prime minister or whoever and then told what he is saying. Why don’t they let the viewers hear with their own ears what these gentlemen are saying? Technically, the product is sometimes so poor that on the rare occasions that someone does get shown talking in his or her own voice, the footage is out of sync. The movement of the lips and the words being spoken do not match.

So, this is the kind of rubbish that is being ladled out to Pakistanis living abroad. There are hardly any programmes that are actually produced in Europe and America or programmes that make mention of life as it is lived here by Pakistanis. The average Pakistani lives in a religious and cultural cocoon anyway and instead of encouraging him to come out of that cocoon, and become an integral part of the society and the country where he lives, these channels are dragging him into the dark pit of ignorance and escapism. Pakistanis living abroad were much better off without these channels and they will live much healthier emotional, psychological and spiritual lives were they to snap the cable.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

In Pakistan, people tend to have opinions, unsupported, or should one say unhindered, by facts. This astonishing ability to show no interest in facts is even more manifest when it comes to seminal events that have rocked the nation since its birth. Take 1971 for example. This elemental trauma did not lead to introspection or analysis, but to myths and myth-making. And yet if anyone were interested in an explanation of the breakup of Pakistan, all he would need to do is read the Hamoodur Rehman Commission Report and Hasan Zaheer’s The Separation of East Pakistan, published in 1995 and, regrettably, read by few. It is an authentic piece of research and none of the facts it records are open to question. The author was a member of the Civil Service of Pakistan; his first posting was to East Pakistan where he spent six years. That was also where he ended up in 1971. He was taken prisoner when Dhaka fell and he spent the next two years in an Indian POW camp. He is no longer alive but what a monumental contribution to contemporary history has he left behind for his countrymen to read and ponder! How sad is it that they neither read nor ponder.

When the Indian troops entered Dhaka, Zaheer with other West Pakistani civil servants and foreign journalists was cooped up in Hotel Intercontinental. He describes how the Indians were received. Indian tanks stopped outside the hotel and the soldiers got down and took up positions outside the entrance and boundary wall. “The crew of the tanks and some other personnel walked into the compound of the bungalow at the opposite corner of Minto Road. The Indians were welcomed by the inmates of the house and the women garlanded them. Trays of sweetmeats and food were brought out by young girls and distributed to the soldiers.” Could there be a more shattering scene for a patriot to witness?

The Yahya regime actually had no intention of transferring power in a meaningful way. The staff scenario worked out by its ideologues before the 1970 elections said that no single party would get a majority, but as the campaigning got into full swing, it became clear that the staff scenario was off the mark. By way of “course correction,” the regime decided to bring the three factions of that eternal concubine, the Muslim League, together (what is again being attempted today) but when it failed, it was Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan on whom the state put its money. So much then for Yahya’s “free and fair” elections! At no time before the elections, Zaheer stresses, did the regime question the Six Points or what their implications were. It was clear even to a child that the Awami League manifesto spelled separation and, at best, a confederal arrangement.

Yahya’s abolition of the One Unit knocked out the principal of parity between East and West, which was the very basis of national unity. Once the election results were in, the regime started playing games, sending conflicting signals to Mujib and Bhutto at different times. While Yahya declared Mujib the future prime minister, his agencies were busy convincing him that his safety could not be guaranteed if he visited West Pakistan, which was why he stayed put in Dhaka. As the regime procrastinated, Mujib found himself encircled by separatist elements. The postponement of the National Assembly was a disaster. If it was the fate of Pakistan to break up, it should have broken up inside the Assembly rather than outside. Bhutto has been accused of getting the Assembly session postponed, but shouldn’t the onus be on Yahya who supposedly took his advice? Had Yahya not postponed the Assembly sine die, the reaction in East Pakistan would not have been so extreme. That he did not give another date, convinced the Awami League that the Assembly was never going to meet.

“I have unleashed the tigers,” Yahya told his naval ADC Khalid Shafi as they flew back to Karachi on the night of 24 March 1971. The killings were indiscriminate, and the humiliation to which troops had been subjected during the protests was more than avenged. However, almost the entire leadership of the Awami League was allowed to escape. Mujib alone was man enough to hold his ground. Until the very end, there were reconciliation opportunities, each one of which the regime sqandered. Once it began to hunt out and liquidate the Hindus, who were held responsible for weaning the Bengalis away from the “true path of Islam,” what had begun as a trickle of refugees into India became a human avalanche. Even if the Indian figures are disbelieved, their number ran into millions. It was the refugees who finally gave India the excuse to invade. The basic army doctrine of the defence of East Pakistan lying in the West, though much weakened in 1965, was finally shattered in 1971. Yahya’s declared strategy was to capture large chunks of India in the West and use them as a bargaining counter. But he did not do that and Pakistan’s strike arm was never used. Reverses were suffered even in the West. Had it not been for the US and the USSR, India would have launched a massive invasion in the West.

When the end was close, so disorganised was everything that the surrender message sent by General Farman Ali to the UN was never authorised by Yahya, although in an earlier message Yahya had told his Governor and the Eastern Command that “in view of our complete isolation from each other, decision about East Pakistan I leave entirely to your good sense and judgment.” Until the end, Yahya kept expecting the US and China to bail out Pakistan, an intervention that was never promised and should not have been expected. Until the end, the Eastern Command kept hanging on to what was an illusory lifeline. When Bhutto was rushed to the UN, Farman’s surrender and ceasefire signal had already reached New York and the game was over. It is to Bhutto’s credit that he was able to retrieve what little of Pakistan’s dignity he could by storming out of the Security Council. As for the draft Polish Resolution which Bhutto is accused of “tearing up,” Zaheer writes, “In UN circles the draft was never taken seriously at the time, as it represented the Indo-Soviet stand and was too one sided to be acceptable.”

It is hard to believe that even after the surrender on 16 December, Yahya not only planned to remain in power but he was giving Pakistan his Cornelius-drawn constitution, which promised the East Pakistan that no longer existed, full autonomy. Writes Zaheer, “Yahya was oblivious of the nation’s trauma. . . He thought he could continue to be President under the new constitution which was ready for promulgation.”

As Pakistan totters on the edge of another abyss, can one hope that General Musharraf will not have history repeat itself?

Aitzaz Ahsan came to Washington last week but so brief was his visit that it reminded me of the one Ghalib compared to saiqa au shoal au seemab, or a flash of lightening, a leaping flame or mercury. He was come and gone before you could say he came. I don’t think there is another in Pakistan who can keep an audience entranced with the sparkle of his conversation as Aitzaz Ahsan can. Quite a few years ago, a young woman from parts foreign asked my friend Zafar Rathore, “And what do you do Mr Rathore.” “Madam,” he replied, “I converse.” So does Aitzaz Ahsan.

We had him over at the small group we have here where anyone interesting from back home is invited to come, break bread with us in a Pakistani restaurant in Springfield, Virginia and converse. The group I named the Kebab Masala Group, since it always met in a restaurant by that name (which went out of business, naturally) actually bears a rather high-sounding name, which could well be that of a think tank in this city of think tanks and tanks of the other kind. It is called the Washington Policy Analysis Group and it was founded over 15 years ago. It has survived all these years for two reasons. It has no office bearers. And it has no membership fee. The rule is that everyone pays for dinner except the guest speaker. To Aitzaz Ahsan’s credit, it should be noted, that at the end of the evening, he offered to chip in. And although it would have been a rare experience to see a lawyer parting with not taking money, he was told, “No, thank you but thank you.”

Nobody asked but half of us were wondering why the brightest light in the toiling masses party was not in London, sitting to the right of the Mohtarma as she reassured Nawaz Sharif that reports of her contacts with the President’s men were overrated. Whether she convinced Nawaz Sharif, who being a cricketer, has a keen eye for the ‘doosra’, is hard to say. I think from now on, he is going to watch her hand and where she pitches the ball. Nor should he be faulted for that. You only have to lower your guard once and your middle stump will be in the vicinity of short fine leg.

But back to Aitzaz Ahsan. He reminded everyone that Gen. Pervez Musharraf was not the spokesman of the Pakistan People’s Party and anything he said or anything said on his behalf should not be confused with the party’s outlook on the weather. He said such stories were spread to throw “the cat of suspicion among pigeons”. He went on to paint a pretty unnerving picture of the ‘free and fair’ elections that the regime is promising everybody, including Charlie’s aunt who can be found, I am told, in the vicinity of Wah Village. He told us about ‘ghost polling stations’ and computer sleight of hand (hats off to Gen. Rafaqat Syed, the Columbus of this novel method of ‘ascertaining’ popular will) artists who produce not rabbis but votes out of their hats. By the time Aitzaz was done with the political bits, he had convinced everyone that Gen. Musharraf was not going to hold elections in order to leave office. Another thing was also clear. Staff scenarios notwithstanding (and in Pakistan they have a sorry record), the General was not riding a tiger. More likely, it was the tiger that was riding him.

Then Aitzaz Ahsan told us a tale — and there is no better raconteur than the man Admiral Ardeshir Cowasjee once named the Cambridge Chaudhry. To the Admiral’s great disappointment, the man he used to call ‘Cicero’ went to the ‘dark side’ by way of a judicial doosra. In Multan jail, AA said, where he was lodged by Gen Zia-ul-Haq, his saving grace was the delightful company of the late Comrade Kaswar Gardezi. The two of them were often served by an Indian who had been there for many, many years. His sin: he had strayed into Pakistan from a neighbouring Indian village and nabbed as a ‘jasoos’. The man we’ll call Ram Lal would have lived happily in Ajmer Sharif with his mother had he not tried to bowl a googly to that master batsman among Saints, the great Khawaja Moinuddin Chishti. His mother used to go to the Khawaja’s shrine every Thursday to light a lamp. One Thursday, being unwell, she gave some money to Ram Lal to make the offering on her behalf. Ram Lal instead of going to the Saint, went gallivanting with his loafer friends. His argument, “Khawaja has been lying there for hundreds of years, he is not going to go away anywhere so what is the hurry, he will get his offering another day.”

The Khawaja, he told Aitzaz Ahsan, doesn’t like being double-crossed, which was why Ram Lal found himself some days later staring into the business end of a very mean-looking gun pointed at him by a Pakistani border guard. Ram Lal said he had been acquitted of the espionage charge but was still here because the moment he stepped out of the jail, he would be an alien without papers and they would pick him up again for more of the same. The jail superintendent confirmed that Ram Lal was right. Years passed. Aitzaz was freed, Zia’s plane crashed, elections were held, Benazir Bhutto became prime minister and who should become the interior minister but Aitzaz Ahsan. One of the first things he did was to ask how many Indian prisoners there were in Pakistani jails. Over 800, he was told. A larger number of Pakistanis was in India. Aitzaz succeeded in persuading his Indian counterpart about an exchange, which took place and Aitzaz saw to it that Ram Lal was safely sent back to Ajmer.

Some time later, he went to Ajmer for a conference — having changed plans to do so on an earlier occasion in favour of a more touristy trip. Having known what the Khawaja had done to Ram Lal, Aitzaz was not going to take any chances. He also wanted to take Ram Lal with him. His Indian hosts mounted a search for Ram Lal but failed to find him. It turned out that on return Ram Lal had been picked up by RAW and given the treatment, this time for being a Pakistani spy. After some time they got bored and let him go. That was the last anyone saw of Ram Lal. He probably went to the Khawaja and said, “I have had more than my share of ill fortune, so if there are no hard feelings, may I leave and disappear somewhere in this vast country so that RAW won’t pick me up again for target practice.” The Khawaja must have smiled and said, “You are cleared to do.” That was the story of Ram Lal that Aitzaz Ahsan told us.

So who knows, the Khawaja may be nice to Aitzaz and his party, though one should bear in mind that Gen. Pervez Musharraf went to see the Khawaja too, the last time he was in India. He couldn’t go the first time, which is perhaps why the Agra summit failed. The moral of the story in Ram Lal’s words: “Ye Khawaja bara sakht hai agar naraaj ho jai tau.”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

When Kuldip Nayar came to Pakistan in 1972 to interview Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, he was one of the first Indian journalists to be invited. He told me that he wanted to go to Sialkot, the city of his birth, where he had gone to school and college and which he had never ceased to reminisce over. Circumventing the mindless travel regulations that were in force when it came to Indian citizens – and that, sadly, remain in force today – I saw to it that he went. That was where all his associations were. His best friend in life was the late Khawaja Shafqat Ali, with whose wife Zarina, Kuldip has kept in touch. The two were inseparable as boys. Kuldip told me that he remembers going to Imam Sahib with Shafqat and seeing Allama Iqbal from the back sitting on a cot. “He was then in a foul mood and loudly said something in Punjabi which I do not recall.”

I asked Kuldip to recollect for me his memories of Sialkot, which he has. He went to the Ganda Singh High School, where a women’s college now stands. After two years at Murray College, he went to Lahore to join FC College and from there to Law College where he earned an LLB on the eve of partition. He did not want to leave Sialkot when India was divided. He writes, “This was my home. I was born and brought up here. Why could not I, a Hindu, live in the Islamic state of Pakistan when there would be hundreds of thousands of Muslims residing in India?” He could not accept that he was suddenly unwelcome in a place where his forefathers and their forefathers had lived for decades.

His family had other reasons to stay back. Most patients of his father, a popular doctor, were Muslims. His best friend Shafqat lived in Sialkot, at whose wish he had had a crescent and star tattooed in his arm. “We had a large property and a retinue of servants. Where would we go if we were to uproot ourselves? Then our spiritual guardian was there. It was not a superstition but our faith that the grave in our back garden was that of a Pir who protected us and guided the family whenever it faced troubles. How could we leave the Pir? The grave was our refuge. We always found relief there. Our Ma, whenever harried or harassed or after her quarrel with our father, ran to the grave for solace. We, three brothers and one sister, bowed before the Pir every Thursday in reverence and lit an earthen lamp. It was our temple.” It is ironic that the Muslim residents of the Nayar home flattened the grave to gain more space. When Kuldip was jailed by Mrs Gandhi during the Emergency, the Pir came to him in a dream and told him that he would be freed that day. He was. Kuldip felt shattered when he came from Delhi to place a green chador on the grave only to find that it no longer existed. Spiritualism lost, property won.

Kuldip knew the people of Sialkot as mild, austere and tolerant, cast in a different mould, with religion not acting as a divider. Thirty percent or 100,000 residents of the city were non-Muslim. “As far as I could remember, we had never experienced tension, much less communal riots,” he recalls. There were Hindu and Muslim mohallas but also mixed neighbourhoods. “Women moved freely, a few in burqa, some in thick chadors, but most with just a dupatta.” Even at the height of the agitation over the demand for Pakistan, Sialkot did not experience any tension. “We felt we had to live together, although we had begun to think in terms of separate identities.” He records that the atmosphere “deteriorated” only when Muslims, ousted from India, began pouring into the city and when it dawned on the population that it had an independent country of its own. “Yet there was no tension, not even a twinge of enmity,” he recalls.

Kuldip writes, “We spoke the same Punjabi. The Punjabi we spoke in Sialkot had a peculiar accent. I discovered this when I met Nawaz Sharif, then Punjab chief minister, for the first time at Delhi. It took him no time to tell me that I was from Sialkot. He said that the way in which I spoke Punjabi had a distinctive twang, a kind of accent, which was confined to the Sialkotis. But why only I? The subcontinent’s two great Urdu poets, Mohammed Iqbal and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who were from Sialkot, spoke Punjabi in the same way.”

Kuldip records that the “city’s innate goodness asserted itself at the time of partition” and there was not a single incident of violence. However, the Jain mohalla in the heart of the city did not go to sleep for nights. Its fears were allayed when the Muslim localities surrounding the mohalla assured protection. What really spoilt the city’s atmosphere was the arrival of a blood-drenched train that had been attacked near Wazirabad, 40 kilometres from Sialkot. Scores of Hindus and Sikhs travelling to Jammu, only 18 kilometres away, had been done to death. A few who had escaped were grievously injured. This single incident led many Hindus and Sikhs in Sialkot to migrate to India.

Kuldip remembers, “Our family was yet to decide about our future. One day in August, before partition, all of us – my parents and three brothers (our sister was already in India) – sat around the dining table to discuss our course of action.” Then came the Quaid-i-Azam’s speech that said all citizens were equal and religion was not the business of the state. Reassured, the Nayar family decided to stay on. Once when the Quaid had come to Law College he had said in answer to Kuldip’s question that once Pakistan was created the two countries would be the best of friends. But things were now going downhill. A peace committee Kuldip and Shafqat had formed was wound up because people’s attitudes had changed. On 14 August, communal poison infected Sialkot. A Hindu sadhu was attacked outside the Nayar home in Trunk Bazar by some Muslim refugees.

No one had foreseen the cataclysmic change that had come over India. The forces of hate and savagery, unleashed with such fury, were now beyond control. Kuldip recalls how the end came. Arjan Das, the District Jail Officer, told the family, “You cannot stay here. This place is not safe any more. I am taking you to my house.” Some years later, it was the same Arjan Das who supervised the hanging of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse. Kuldip recalls, “His voice was comforting. Nobody questioned him. Nor did anyone want to stay back in the house. We followed him quietly, leaving the food on the table untouched. My mother hurriedly packed a suitcase and we rushed down to the car Das was driving. It was a small vehicle and we had to sit on each other’s lap to fit in.”

I often think that had there been no transfer of populations on a massive scale, India and Pakistan would have lived in friendship. There would have been no wars. There would have been no Kashmir issue and people would have lived where they had always lived. Speaking of my own family, we would have continued to live in Kashmir, spending our summers in Srinagar and our winters in Jammu, as we always have.

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