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It is ironic that Muslehuddin died during the first stint in power of a party for which – and for whose founder – he had always had a soft spot in his heart. Power is the ultimate intoxicant and when it is mixed with inexperience and the inability to tell friend from foe, the results are bizarre and ultimately disastrous. When the princess of the poor took office, in her train came some very strange people. I wonder if anyone knows what became of Happy Minwala, who strutted around in those days claiming to be the lady’s international fixer. But I suppose we only need wait. If the Mohtarma, the only title she wishes to be addressed by, returns to the catbird seat in Islamabad, Happy and his flock will come chirping in from nowhere. Zia Ispahani will go as ambassador to France and Khawaja Shahid Hussain to Rome perhaps.

Muslehuddin was one of those people about whom one can say without hesitation that he was born to be a journalist. He chose to become a reporter at a time when there was neither money in the profession (not that there is much even today) nor the kind of future that sets aflutter the hearts of mothers with marriageable daughters. He worked for the Civil and Military Gazette and when that closed down in 1963, he joined the Associated Press of Pakistan, which could still be called a news agency and not an extension of the Press Information Department, whose output today must embarrass even those whose great deeds it celebrates.

Muslehuddin was among the first to join Pakistan Television (PTV) news, along with Zafar Samdani, in 1964, a decision that many of his friends in newspapers thought odd and ill-advised. He remained with the Corporation through good times and bad till he died of a sudden cerebral stroke. He was Director of News but being a man with a deep sense of personal honour and confidence in his ability, he could not bear the humiliation that he was now being subjected to by the constant sniping that he was an appointee of the “people’s government” whose only task at PTV news appeared to consist of throwing his weight around and rubbing everyone on the wrong side. Muslehuddin, too dignified a man to suffer such insolence, went on leave but when he returned he found things to be even worse. Those who knew Muslehuddin and how he had been treated swore that it was the tension that killed him.

In 1982, Muslehuddin was put in charge of a PTV department that, according to a letter he wrote me, “would have been more appropriate at the East India Company.” He wrote, “Here there is time to spare to while which away, I read books, go through newspapers and watch Shabana Azmi’s movies. I have listened to Mirza Ghalib’s ghazals in the voice of KL Saigol and read our common friend, Abdul Qadir Hasan’s columns. I have even heard Ahadullah Akmal’s lectures on the benefits of paying one’s taxes in time. Evenings are forlorn, Islamabad being the Kufa of Pakistan. I am reminded of what you said to HK Burki when we were being driven from Chandigarh to Simla for the Simla Conference in 1972. You had said Pakistan’s capital should have been Jullandhar since all key positions, on inquiry, turn out to be held by those who come from Jullandhar. I think the capital of Pakistan should be Sialkot, rather its Kashmiri Mohalla. These days Sialkoti graduates are in occupation of scores of official posts, very much as we used to be in occupation of the tables of Casino restaurant in Lahore. In Islamabad’s Aabpara, there is a halwa-poori shop called Lahori Badshah, where I ran into HK Burki the other day. When I told him that I was going to write to you, he asked me to tell you that given all the obituaries you have been writing, he is beginning to feel that at this rate, his number may soon be up.”

Muslehuddin was in love with the city of Lahore, though once he left it for Rawalpindi and Islamabad, he only returned to it occasionally, and when he did, it made him think of old times and old friends. He was one of Sardar Muahmmad Sadiq’s great admirers, and he was present when the title of Sher-e-Punjab was conferred on the Sardar by his fellow “awara-gard” friends, of whom Muslehuddin was one and I another, although my stint was much shorter, yet no less memorable. During the Zia-ul-Haq years, I stayed away from Pakistan but my contact with Muslehuddin was kept through the letters he would mail, almost always when travelling abroad on a PTV assignment. Such were the times that it was safer not to come to the notice of government spies on the lookout for those known to be in touch with “enemies of the state.”

Three of the letters Muslehuddin wrote me – his penmanship was superb – I have carried with me; others I have lost. Here is one written in black ink on the stationery of Hotel New Otani, Tokyo on 24 July 1984. In those days, I used to write a weekly column for Agha Murtaza Pooya’s The Muslim (of whose owner Altaf Gauhar said, “ The Muslim is bankable; Pooya is not”). Muslehuddin writes, “We now meet through what you write in newspapers and what old friends sometimes report. But we can’t converse – and that is one link that I miss. I remember our days in Shezan and Lahore’s uncrowned king Sardar Sadiq declaring, “There are two funny columns in The Pakistan Times : Khalid Hasan’s ‘Of This and That’ and ZA Suleri’s editorial. Now when I go to Lahore, none of the old friends is any longer to be found on the Mall. I walk into Hamid’s bookshop, touch his right knee to pay homage to the days that were and leave.”

In another letter he writes, “Your book has brought back memories that lie scattered on the stretches of the Mall, in Shezan, The Pakistan Times , APP and Hamid’s bookshop. I hear echoes of the laughter that once marked our gatherings in that city of cities, Lahore, in its restaurants, cafes and newspaper offices.” I had written that Muslehuddin was the one true heir and successor to Sardar Sadiq. Muslehuddin writes, “To be heir and successor to Sher-i-Punjab Sardar Muhammad Sadiq is a great honour. Few people know that Sardar’s Sadiq’s saintly indifference to material things was in itself a kind of kingship. To think of the Mall without him is to think of an emptiness. Hamid’s bookshop keeps getting smaller, squeezed in by stores selling readymade garments and shoes. In Pakistan, books are less and less needed, residential plots more and more.”

Muslehuddin’s wit bore his incomparable stamp. To a gentleman in a long beard and a divine’s cap, he said, as his holiness was about to remove the last four of the gulab jamans from a serving dish at an official tea party, “Maulana, at least leave a couple for the perpetuation and survival of their race.”

How long is the war in Afghanistan going to go on? This question if asked on a quiz show can be guaranteed to flummox the eager-looking characters seen at the receiving end of such queries. The war, of course, keeps many people in business. US contractors, who would be on the street if there were no wars in the world, of which America is now by habit a part, directly or otherwise. Armament manufacturers would have no one to sell their deadly stuff to. Governments that are kept in power because of their usefulness to one or the other combatant, will find themselves tossed on the rubbish heap of history were war to be abolished.

However, wars are not going to be abolished because they keep many gainfully employed, including military and civilian experts. One of them, retired US General Barry R McCaffrey, who is adjunct professor of international affairs at the United States Military Academy, West Point (the American Kakul, you might say) was in Pakistan and Afghanistan in February. His report to his principals on return has also been made available to some of us through what I can guarantee was a perfectly legitimate route.

The report is short (which is its most ennobling feature) and its tone is staccato, which should only have been expected. The “sources” cited by Gen. McCaffrey number 23 in Afghanistan and 11 in Pakistan. One of the 23 sources in Afghanistan is cited as “INL Director Elizabeth Richard and Mr. Gene Trammell Deputy Programme Manager, Afghan Eradication Force.” Afghan Eradication Force? Shurely shum mishtake there!

Of Pakistan and Pakistanis (thank God it does not call us Paks, which is standard American shorthand when there are no Pakistanis present) the report says, “The Pakistanis are in a very difficult political and military situation. Their domestic reputation as an Army for professionalism and valour is all that holds together the four nations of Pakistan under one weak state. They have never controlled the FATA areas. The 80,000 troops they put into the FATA have suffered hundreds of killed and wounded. They are still there. They have never controlled Balochistan outside of the urban areas without concentrated military force. They are a poor country with a very effective Army –(Partially our military responsibility. We do support them with $100 million a month. However, we need to provide the support needed to actually control their borders and the chaos of their frontier regions).”

The General goes on to write, “In my view, the Pakistanis are NOT actively supporting the Taliban — nor do they have a strategic purpose to destabilise Afghanistan. There is a history of support for the Taliban among the Pakistani Army. The Taliban are in many respects neither Afghans nor Pakistanis — they are Pashtuns wearing Black turbans and baggy pants — with AK47s and with an aversion to foreigners (US or Pakistani Army). 27 million Pashtuns live on both sides of the border — 60 tribes — 80% in desperate poverty, 19% literacy, three million are Afghan refugees in Pakistan living right along the frontier. The Duran Line (I take it the General means Durand Line, but what is a dropped D between tight friends and allies) does not exist as a recognised political division in the view of the many tribes which dominate the frontier regions.

The Pakistanis need better US support for COIN operations in South and North Waziristan.”

Gen McCaffrey writes, “We need to sort out a set of strategic tools to help them do better. They immediately require the $395 million they have requested for their Frontier Corps. It will be a disaster for our strategic purpose if we push them to premature military action which destroys them as a unifying and stabilising force in the region. Pakistan is in many respects our most important ally in the global struggle against terrorism. Their economy is booming, poverty is being reduced, and the economy is trying to diversify. President Musharraf must face an election in 2007. He is the most democratic leader in Pakistan’s history. The control of the Army has been traditionally the only form of continued legitimate political power in Pakistan. The Army is the only load-bearing institution. The Police are corrupt. The lower courts are intimidated. (The higher court system is very capable.) The people trust and admire the Army more than any other institution. The ISI is also essentially an extension of the Army. Some of the national business elite are from the Army. The political parties have been ineffective or

Dangerous — (personality not policy based, corrupt, extreme, and incompetent). Politics in Pakistan until Musharraf has been about political families and their struggle for power.

The US will miss our brilliant US Ambassador Ryan Crocker during the coming crucial 24 months. We must continue to strongly support democratic reform — but not to forget the vital US national objectives at stake in Pakistan in the immediate future.”

So there you have it in a nutshell. The people of Pakistan trust and admire the Army more than any other institution. The ISI (poor thing, so cruelly maligned in recent years) is “essentially an extension of the Army” and thus, ipso facto, trusted and admired by the people of Pakistan. The political parties are “ineffective and dangerous” as well as “corrupt, extreme and incompetent.” The police is corrupt (and don’t we know that!) and the lower courts are incompetent (which is true because a case I filed in a civil court twenty years ago is still to be heard). As for those who have been dreaming of democracy, well, they should take a cold shower and go for a long walk after reading what the General has said.

“President Musharraf must face an election in 2007. He is the most democratic leader in Pakistan history. The control of the Army has been traditionally the only form of continued legitimate political power in Pakistan.”

We should all have joined the Army, I now realise.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Today, when terrorism, unleashed in the name of Islam by misguided, ignorant men following confused self-destructive agendas, has made the last of the revealed religions synonymous in the West with violence, Muslims, both governments and people, will do well to hear Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s voice which was so cruelly silenced by a military dictator and a compliant Pakistani judiciary twenty eight years ago.

In his address to the historic Second Islamic Summit in Lahore in February 1974, attended by 37 heads of states and governments, kings, presidents and prime ministers, a stellar gathering never witnessed before or since, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto said something that in hindsight can only be called prophetic. At the time, there was no al Qaeda, no Taliban, no “Islamism,” no “jihadi Islam” and yet he must have foreseen, the statesman and visionary that he was, what lay in store for the world’s Muslims.

Bhutto said, “As we meet here today, I find it necessary that we should clearly set forth not only our attitudes to the issues of the day but also the bases of Muslim unity. There are certain features of our aim and purpose which are not yet clearly perceived by the rest of the world. These must be stressed if an understanding of the Muslim world is to be promoted in the rest of the human race.

“First, we repudiate chauvinism as much as we reject alien dominance. This repudiation arises not only from our recognition of the realities of time and space but from the very spirit and temper of Islam. As there is arrogance of power, so also can there be arrogance of belief. Our religion warns us severely against any conceit which would breed the delusion that we are the chosen people and we enjoy an immunity from the operation of the forces that shape the destinies of mankind.

“Secondly, our vocation as Muslims is not to harbour hostility against other human communities, East or West, North or South, but to so conduct ourselves that we can help build bridges of communication and sympathy between one set of nations and another. We draw our inspiration from the Holy Quran and I quote: ‘Say: To Allah belong both East and West: He guideth whom He will to a straight path. Thus we have appointed you a midmost nation that you might be witnesses over the nations and the Apostle a witness over yourselves.’

“In being called the midmost nation or the People of the Middle, we are charged with the mission of mediating conflicts, spurning the doctrines of bigotry and hate, trampling underfoot the myths of racial or cultural superiority and translating into social terms the concepts of mercy and beneficence which constitute the core of our faith. The concept of the People of the Middle is suggestive also of a new synthesis. Through a conventional opposition, the East has been considered as spiritual and contemplative and the West materialistic and pragmatic. Islam rejects such dichotomies. The Muslim accepts both worlds, the spiritual and the material. What he tries to do is to find the reserves of spirituality, the respect for human personality and the sense of what is sacred in all cultural traditions, which could serve to fashion a new type of man. His aim is more than the mere mastery of nature. If he is a true Muslim, he is at once Eastern and Western, materialistic and spiritual, a man of enterprise as well as of grace.”

Warming up to his theme, Bhutto said Muslims should promote rather than subvert the solidarity of the Third World, based on human not on ethnic factors. The distinctions of race are anathema to Islam, he declared, but a “kinship of suffering and struggle appeals to a religion which has always battled against oppression and sought to establish justice.” It was this solidarity, he said, that reflects the similarity of the historic experiences of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America. “They have suffered the same injustices, borne the same travail and are engaged in the same struggle. Theirs is a solidarity of the forces that seek to combat exploitation, end the disparities in mankind’s lot and reclaim the inheritance of its majority.”

The Islamists of today, no less than their predecessors of yesterday, reject nationalism, which is why every religious divine and every Islamic group was opposed to the movement for Pakistan in the deluded belief that a nation state would mean that Islam was being confined within physical, man-made borders. Bhutto, aware of this dilemma, dealt with it in a masterful way. He told the Summit, “I must refer to a certain ambivalence in our Muslim minds about the role of nationalism in Islam and its compatibility with the establishment of an Islamic community. We have several nationalisms among us, Arab and non-Arab, all equally vigorous and vibrant with aspiration.” He called nationalism “a necessary tributary to the broad stream of human culture.” He said, “It takes a full understanding of one’s own country, of its history and language and traditions to develop an understanding of other countries, of their inner life, and of our relations with them. Islam provides both the spirit and the technique of such a mutuality. Patriotism and loyalty to Islam can thus be fused into a transcendent harmony. As Muslims, we can rise higher than our nationalism, without damaging or destroying it.”

Bhutto ended his eloquent address which was equally cheered by king and commoner, republican and royalist, dictator and democrat, on a memorable note, although the hope that the great promise the Summit had generated we allowed to slip through our fingers. Bhutto, who was still chairman of the Summit when he was hanged, said, “I trust that we will not fritter away the historic opportunities now presented to us. For long centuries, we have hoped for a turning point. That turning point has arrived. The break of a new dawn is not now a forlorn hope. Poverty need no longer be our portion. Humiliation need no longer be our heritage. Ignorance need no longer be the emblem of our identity.”

But that, alas, is what the Muslims of the world have become, with terrorism as their new identifying mark.

Profiling at US airports is now a fact of life. Although routine denials, whose frequency has decreased with time, are still made from official quarters, no one denies their existence, indeed their necessity. Almost every time, I have gone in or out of the States, I have been singled out for special attention, which is flattering, though when they ask you “to please follow me,” some people do look up to see if the third deputy of Osama bin Laden’s fourth cousin has finally been nabbed.

To be the bearer of a Muslim name is not convenient these days. What has happened is that there are numerous databases containing information of all kinds. Who knows what triggers an alert. It could be one’s name, part of one’s name, one’s date of birth, the travel stamps in the passport, the place of birth, the country last visited. Once that happens, the passenger is asked to step aside, taken to an area where he may be interrogated, sometime for hours, or he may just be asked to sit down while his papers are looked through and cross-checked with whatever had triggered the alarm.

Since 9/11 many eminent Pakistanis arriving in the United States have been given the treatment, including the present Governor of the NWFP, Lt-Gen. Ali Jan Orakzai, when he was still corps commander at Peshawar and had arrived in the US on the official invitation of CENTCOM. The fact that he was an official guest of the US military had no effect on those ascertaining whatever they were trying to ascertain. I recall that the then press secretary to President Pervez Musharraf and head of ISPR, Maj.-Gen Rashid Qureshi was subjected to the same kind of treatment. Some of our ministers will also have similar stories to tell.

That being so, I am not surprised at the reception accorded to noted Pakistani-American academic Prof Mumtaz Ahmed of Hampton University, Virginia recently. In a speech at a conference, he spoke about his questioning at Tel Aviv airport some years ago, when he was returning after a study tour of the region. Since he had met some members of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad in Gaza, he merited special attention, notwithstanding the fact that he had also interviewed Israeli officials and academics. He was asked to hand over the notes that he had kept in Urdu, but he refused. In the end, he was allowed to board his flight.

Prof Mumtaz Ahmed writes, “But low and behold, while the Israelis were considerate enough not to subject me to body search or to look into my baggage and search my papers, the Homeland Security Department of my own country was not so considerate. It so happens that I share my last name Ahmad with at least 150 million other Muslims, including someone who is on a suspect list of the Homeland Security Department. So during the last two years, whenever I return from my overseas travels at any port of entry — whether it’s Chicago, Los Angeles, or JFK — I am picked up by an Immigration Officer, escorted by him/her to some back room at the airport, and interrogated by the Homeland Security people. The first time it happened to me, I was returning from a research trip to Pakistan and Bangladesh, and I was carrying extensive notes of my interviews with all kinds of Islamic leaders and activists with me. And this time, the notes were not in broken script; they were in regular, legible script in Urdu. And I know that FBI and Homeland Security have hired many people since 9/11 who can read Urdu.

“Anyway, they asked me some questions, and then, without my permission, opened my suitcase. Then they started opening my files, taking out sheets of papers, making photocopies of all the papers that I had with me, including the newspaper clippings. And — you guessed it right — all my newspaper clippings were on terrorism, on militancy, on radicalism. They were so excited that they got their man. Everything they were looking for was right there — screaming headlines of suicide bombing, vociferous anti-American statements of Islamic militants, roaring calls for Jihad, it was all there! Then they asked for my wallet, and they took my credit cards and photocopied them. But then they started photocopying the entire deck of the visiting cards that they had earlier taken from my suitcase. That made me very upset. There were so many people I met in Pakistan and Bangladesh who were not even my research subjects; they were people I met casually at some reception, or in a meeting or at a dinner, and with whom I exchanged cards as people usually do when they meet for the first time … And I thought, ‘My God, all their names are now going to be on the list of the Homeland Security and FBI, and they will curse me for the rest of their lives! Every time they will apply for a US visa or enter the United States, their names will be there.’ The problem was that all my research notes — my interviews with some of the “radical leaders” in Bangladesh — were photocopied, and now they are probably with the Homeland Security Anti-Terrorism Task Force. If there is anyone from that agency present here, please return my notes.

“Since then, I have realised that I probably cannot maintain confidentiality as long as I am not cleared from the Homeland Security Department. Now I have started writing my notes in Punjabi — and not even in Punjabi, but in a dialect of Punjabi that only I and my mother speak. So this for me is the safest way to maintain confidentiality of my research subjects. Confidentiality is very, very difficult in terrorism research, particularly in the United States where laws have been passed that can compel disclosure of any information that the government wants. And if I refuse to comply, then I am in trouble. Of course, as in legal practice, I will have no qualms about disregarding the confidentiality principle if a law is going to be broken or when human lives are at stake. But that’s where the line should be drawn.”

So that is the way it is folks, out here.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

The savagery that gripped the Subcontinent at a moment in history which should have been its most glorious remains inexplicable. While a great deal of academic work has been completed in India on the massacres and the movement of millions from one part of the divided land to the other, little of that has been done on our side, which is yet another pity that can be added to the long list of pities that every Pakistani carries in his heart.

Some years ago, I published a book of reminiscences about Jammu and how its Muslim population had been all but decimated in 1947, ironically with the connivance, if not at the directions, of the Maharaja’s government, which was supposed to have protected them. That slim book remains the only first-hand account, as far as I know, of what life was like for the Muslims of Jammu before 1947 and what happened to them as India and Pakistan awoke to freedom. Some copies of the book, Memory Lane to Jammu, found their way to Jammu and several people who read it later said that they really had no idea what had happened to the Muslims of Jammu city and outlying areas in 1947. Included in the book was a first-hand account recorded for the late Justice Muhammad Yusuf Saraf by Dr Abdul Karim, more than twenty of whose family members were killed and whose daughter was abducted, never to be found. He himself received eleven sword and knife wounds on his body and was left for dead.

A couple of months ago, I received an email from Bal Kishan Gupta, a retired engineer who lives in Georgia. He wrote, “I read your article on Jammu 1947 on the website. It is a heart rending account of the massacre of Muslims in Jammu. I am from Mirpur and was a witness to the slaughter of the Hindus and Sikhs of Mirpur. As a matter of fact, I am one of the few survivors of the Alibeg concentration camp. As Muslim refugees from Jammu mark the anniversary of the November 5 Jammu killings, the Hindu and Sikh survivors of Mirpur remember the November 25 holocaust of Mirpur.” He asked if I would publish his story and I said I would.

The account he sent me is harrowing. He was only ten at the time but he says he has a photographic memory. Many members of his immediate family, including some of his uncles and his great grandfather, a man of ninety, were killed in Mirpur. Some of what Gupta has recorded I have tried to corroborate from sources on our side but without luck. Hardly anything is on record. Even Justice Saraf in his two-volume history of the freedom movement in the State has confined his account to the military encounters that took place between bands of Pathan irregulars, sections of the Pakistan army and freebooters and the remnants of the Maharaja’s forces. It is not a satisfactory account and its gung-ho, super-patriotic tone is troubling because I expected more objectivity from a judge and Kashmiri patriot.

Justice Saraf writes that Mirpur district had Hindu majorities in its three principal towns of Mirpur, Kotli and Bhimber. Many Hindus fleeing from West Punjab had taken refuge in Mirpur town, swelling its non-Muslim population to 20,000. According to him, “local mujahids and Pakistani volunteers” cut off the Mirpur Cantt and a 500-strong force moved towards Mirpur town which was surrounded by the second week of November 1947. A force of 1,000 of tribesmen from Dir also joined in. Most of the atrocities committed against the non-Muslim residents of Mirpur were by these men, though Saraf does not record that. The outer defences of Mirpur city crumbled and many houses were set on fire. He writes, “At about 4 pm (on 23 November) a column of humanity was seen emerging from the barbed wire enclosure on the Eastern side,” made up of civilians and flanked by Dogra troops, which soon abandoned their helpless charges. The caravan scattered and as Saraf puts it “their condition was pitiable; the effects of the fighting and the conditions of siege were clearly noticeable; they were emaciated, exhausted and frightened.” By the evening, there was no Hindu or Sikh left in Mirpur town. Saraf records that while “some Pathans as well as local Muslims wanted to kill the Hindus and abduct their women,” they were prevented from doing so and the people who had now become refugees in their own land, were sent to Alibeg Gurudwara which was turned into a refugee camp.

Gupta’s memories are different. “As a ten-year-old child I, along with 5,000 Hindus and Sikhs, was held prisoner in the Alibeg prison. On March 16, 1948, only about 1,600 prisoners walked out from Alibeg alive. I was one of them. Most of the survivors of Alibeg have died since the horrific massacres. As one of its few survivors, I feel compelled to document the events I witnessed. Around November 25, 1947, there were nearly 25,000 Hindus and Sikhs living in Mirpur. During the city’s capture, close to 2,500 were killed in the infernos that erupted due to Pakistani artillery fire. Another 2,500 escaped with the retreating Jammu and Kashmir army. The remaining 20,000 were marched in a procession towards Alibeg. Along the way, Pakistani troops and Pathans killed about 10,000 of the captured Hindu and Sikh men and kidnapped over 5,000 women. The 5,000 Hindus and Sikhs who survived the 20-mile trek to Alibeg were imprisoned. In Janaury 1948, the Red Cross rescued 1,600 of the survivors from Alibeg. Between 1948 and 1954, around 1,000 abducted Hindu and Sikh women were recovered from Pakistan and Azad Kashmir.”

Gupta writes, “My grandmother Kartar Devi, my paternal uncle Mohanlal Gupta, and my maternal great-grandfather Lalman Shah were some of those who died in the infernos of Mirpur. My mother Padma Devi and my aunts, Rajmohni Gupta and Sushila Gupta, were some of the women kidnapped from the Mirpur courthouse. My wife’s grandmother Diwan Devi Gupta and aunt were among those killed during the forced march towards Alibeg. My wife’s cousin, Sesh Gupta, was one of the girls kidnapped by Pathans. Her fate is not known to this day. My mother’s uncles, Lal Chand Dhangeryal, Chander Prakash Dhangeryal, Dina Nath Dhangeryal, Khemchand Bhagotra and her many cousins (whose names I do not remember) were killed. I saw Sardar Ibrahim in Alibeg surrounded by his bodyguards. The only helpful Muslims to visit Alibeg were Chaudhri Abdul Aziz of Datial village, who saved many Hindu children and women in his village, and Fateh Mohammed of Serai Alamgir who saved some Hindus from being slaughtered.”

Many Mirpuri Hindus and Sikhs settled in Jammu, where there exists a Mirpur Road and a memorial sacred to the memory of the men, women and children who were killed for no other reason except that they were Hindus and Sikhs. I close this sad story with a snatch from the poem Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote on his return from Dhaka: When will the eye behold the sight of grass without blemish? How many rains will it take for the blood spots to wash away?

What is the world coming to with the Voice of America broadcasting spiritual healing beamed direct from Karachi! If this is how this state organ wants to contribute to the war on global terrorism, then it has another think coming.

If someone had told me that the VOA was now in the business of offering divine advice and that too from a gent who contributes a column to the mouthpiece of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan, I would not have believed it. But one has to believe one’s own ears, unless I have been hearing voices, which, given the world we live in, cannot be ruled out.

In the event that what I heard was actually what went on the air, let me introduce Syed Saeed Alam who writes a column called ‘Roohani Clinic’ for the Karachi daily that has been trying to put us on the strait and narrow that leads out of Mansoora but where it goes I am not sure, unless it goes to Perditionville. We were also given the great good news that Syed Saeed Alam had put together his columns in a book, called, as was to be expected, Sirat-e-Mustqeem, the straight path. Normally a plug like that should cost an arm and a leg, considering that it is going out worldwide, given the reach of the Internet. But Uncle Sam is generous and does not charge for such services, which, if used, can land you a job, find you your lost pet or beloved, as the case may be, get you to marry the spouse of your dreams, and make your defiant offspring fall and your fighting frau in line, turning both the offspring and the spouse into pet lambs.

The Karachi clairvoyant, I am told, is interviewed every week all the way from Washington and asked how to solve through spiritual means problems ranging from coming upon the right match that parents of unmarried boys and girls seek, interpretation of dreams and social and religious conundrums. It is unbelievable what the spiritual scribe and broadcaster whose voice is going out to the world on VOA airwaves can get accomplished.

The interviewer from Washington, and from right inside the studios of Voice of America, put the spiritual master from Karachi on the air recently to plug his book. The heavenly pronouncements of Syed Saeed Alam were greeted by the interviewer’s “Masha Allah”. I pinched myself once or twice to make sure that I was really listening to Radio Aap ki Dunya, the hip name some oddballs in the VOA board of governors approved for their Urdu programme, not perhaps realising that it was a steal, being far too close to BBC World Service’s celebrated show ‘This is Your World’.

The interviewer in a voice dripping with holy sentiment asked Syed Saeed Alam what his book contained and what problems it would help resolve. In a voice that people of his ilk adopt when addressing those who in their view are fit candidates for the eternal bonfire that awaits the wicked, he said he wanted nothing except to help people cope, spiritually and socially. He said one problem that families were faced with was the problem of finding the right match for their offspring. However, he had licked that problem and it was all very simple. After the last prayer of the day, the supplicant should recite two of the Quran’s verses and do so for forty days, after which period the right match will materialise as if from nowhere.

He then advocated that those caught on the horns of a dilemma should do the following. Before going to bed at night, the supplicant should perform his ablutions, then recite the darood three times, followed by intoning Ya Raheem 300 times, followed by another three recitations of the darood. Thereafter, he should lay himself down on his right side. “The connection is now working and he can talk to God,” Syed Saeed Alam declared. In the next three nights, clear guidance will come through. “They don’t need to call me for an interpretation. Here is the key,” he said. The guidance will come through a dream in the next three nights. If in his dream, the supplicant sees clouds, rain, river, sea, green grass or mountains, it means, “Do it.” However, if he sees darkness, evil spirits, beasts or blood, the message is clear, “Don’t do it.”

When Radio Aap ki Dunya was brought on the air — among other inexplicable things done by Uncle since 9/11 — it was said by the visionaries who had thought it up that the audience they wanted to reach had a maximum age of thirty-nine (all those above that number, move the dial to Radio Tirana). Much of what this target audience got was music, and the pop variety for the most part, if not entirely.

Hadeeqa Kyani I am all right with, but Syed Saeed Alam? Please, give me a break!

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Anwar Shabnam Dil, who spent many years working on Prof Ahmed Shah Bokhari’s life and work and who produced a book of abiding value on him, told me in 1993 that “Bokhari’s great work was done at the United Nations.” He said that apart from being as great an internationalist as Dag Hammerskjold, he was the first advocate of liberation movements in colonised countries across Africa and the Middle East. That credit has been denied him by his countrymen, as they have denied it to Sir Zafralla Khan, though for different reasons.

Said Dil, “He was their voice and no voice was more eloquent than his. His great work was devoted to larger questions, the human condition itself. If the Third World is looking for heroes, Bokhari would stand tall in that pantheon, taller than most.” A woman told Dil that when Bokhari walked into a room, he would light it up. If conversation is an art, then Bokhari was its most brilliant practitioner. From 1947 to 1951, he was Principal of Government College, Lahore (now ungrammatically called Government College University, something that must make Bokhari turn in his New York grave). What books Pakistan was able to get of its share from the Indian Office Library in London, it may owe to Bokhari who negotiated their retrieval. Were Bokhari alive today and were some sections of the collection still to be apportioned, it is not he who would be sent but some sifarshi who would return home with his bags filled, not with books but with shopping from Oxford Street with his “lady wife.”

Had Bokhari had no accomplishment other than Patras ke Muzameen , a slim collection of eleven humorous essays, his name would have lived. It has been said by his students that there was no finer teacher of English literature than him, nor one with a deeper understanding of its vast treasures of prose and poetry. His knowledge of Shakespeare was encyclopaedic. Legendary tales of his time as Principal of Government College have been recorded by his contemporaries and students, one of which goes like this. Bokhari was at his desk, looking through his papers when he heard someone walk in. Without looking up, he said, “Please take a chair.” The man, a member of the Indian Civil Service, felt insulted, “I am so and so of the ICS,” he announced superciliously.

“Then take two chairs,” Bokhari said without looking up.

But it is those essays of light humour that give us the opportunity to take the true measure of the man. Here is Bokhari’s foreword to the book (I hope he won’t award me a D-minus for translation): “If someone has sent this book to you as a free gift, then he has done me a favour. If you have stolen it from somewhere, then I compliment you on your good taste. If you have bought it with your own money, then you have my sympathies. Under the circumstances, it is best that you consider this a good book to justify your lack of judgment. All characters in these essays are fictional, even those occasionally plastered with the first person singular, though they may claim they are not. . . If some gentleman wishes to translate this book into a foreign language, he should first seek the permission of the people of the country who speak that language.” (Should I have written to the Queen?)

And here is his classic essay on “Lahore’s Geography.” Introduction: “By way of introduction, I wish to submit that it is now many years since Lahore was discovered, thus there is no need to prove its existence through Dalayal Buraheen (a forbiddingly learned tome by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan). Nor should it be necessary that the globe should be set in motion from the left till the country called India comes to a stop before your eyes, and on which you should start searching for the intersecting point of the longitude and latitude where Lahore is to be found. Suffice it to say that wherever you spot Lahore, that exactly is where Lahore is. This research has been briefly but comprehensively summed up by our elders who state that Lahore is Lahore. If you are unable to find Lahore where it is supposed to be, then your education is below par and your intelligence is of a lower order. A couple of mistakes I do wish to correct though. Lahore is situated in the Punjab but Punjab no longer is the Land of Five Rivers, since only four and a half of them actually flow. The half river is no longer capable of flowing, which is why it is commonly referred to as Old Ravi. Access address: This river keeps lying under two bridges built close to the city. The pastime of flowing it gave up quite some time ago. This makes it somewhat difficult to say if the city is located on the river’s left or its right bank. Several routes lead to Lahore, but two of them are very famous: one from Peshawar and the other from Delhi. Central Asian invaders come by the Peshawar route and invaders from the United Province via Delhi. The former are called The Sword Bearers and they carry the nom de plume of Ghaznavi or Ghauri.”

And here is an excerpt from his essay titled Dogs. “Inquiries made from zoologists and veterinarians, apart from much time spent in trying to understand as to what use dogs are, an answer has so far proved elusive. Take the cow: it provides milk. Take the goat: it provides milk, and it expels tiny balls of offal. What do these dogs do? The dog is said to be a faithful animal. If being faithful means you start barking come the hour of seven in the evening and continue barking without break until six in the morning, then we are better off without a tail . . . Undoubtedly, our relations with dogs have been somewhat strained, but we can swear that on no occasion have we turned away from non-violence. You may consider it unnatural but as God is our witness, we have never raised our hand against a dog, although various friends have advised that we carry a stick or a staff at night as it is known to be effective tool against a whole range of evils. However, we have no wish to create enmity with anyone. It is true that as soon as a dog begins to bark, our instinctive gentleness so overwhelms us as to give some onlookers the impression that we are cowardly . . . One night as we turned a corner on the road, we came upon a tethered goat, but to us it appeared to be a dog. Imagine a dog as big as a goat, in other words a dog dog. Our hands and feet swelled and the stick in our hand that we had been twirling around, came to a dead stop at a most unreasonable angle. The music we had been making by whistling underwent a tremor before slipping into silence . . . As long as there are dogs in this world who insist on barking, we can be said to have one foot in the grave.”

And here is Bokhari’s Mirza Sahib, who once sold him the world’s worst cycle, “Take Mirza Sahib now. Quite a nice man you would say with such an innocent face that one could mistake him for a mosque Imam. Gamble, he does not, gulli-danda he has no love for, pickpocket he isn’t, but pigeons he does raise, which provide him with his entertainment.”

Ahmed Shah Bokhari! What a guy!

This may not be open season on ducks and drakes but it is on Pakistan. The onslaught has been unremitting. The refrain of this orchestrated song is just four words: Pakistan should do more.

While by now everyone I know is sick to his gills, having had the same four words drilled into his ears for the last year or so, the US national security orchestra continues to plays the same song. Obviously it loves the tune. Dick Cheney, whose name sounds like that of a seedy character from a Raymond Chandler novel, is the guest conductor. His fly-in-fly-out foray into Pakistan was undertaken to sing the ditty personally into the General’s ear.

The very day Cheney was in Islamabad, the New York Times ran a planted story, which said that he had “delivered a stiff private message” to President Musharraf. This account of the charming treatment of “America’s closest ally in the war on terrorism,” as Pakistan has been called on hundreds of occasions, was followed by the even more charming news that Democrats have threatened to link aid to Pakistan to its effectiveness in combating those twin otters of murder and mayhem, Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The newspaper noted that Cheney’s trip was one of a series to Pakistan by senior members of the administration to keep the pressure on Gen. Musharraf. To some outside analysts, that is a sign of increasing concern that American efforts to coax along the sometimes-prickly Pakistani leader has hit its limits, it added.

The Washington Post, not to be left behind, said that the Cheney visit signalled the White House’s “growing impatience with Pakistan’s failure to crack down on Islamic extremists”. US officials are increasingly worried, it said, that the Taliban are making a comeback in Afghanistan, using parts of Pakistan to stage cross-border raids and undermine the authority of President Karzai. Officials were also said to be concerned that Al Qaeda is more active in Pakistani tribal areas and that Gen. Musharraf has been insufficiently aggressive about taking action, despite promises to President Bush and other senior officials that he would address the situation. The Washington Times, which is owned by the Moonies, said that the US and Afghan leaders are “increasingly critical of Pakistan’s efforts to curb Al Qaeda and Taliban cross-border operations”.

What is now in operation in Washington vis-à-vis Pakistan is the old good cop/bad cop act. Congress will be used as the bad cop and the administration will act as the good cop. The negative leaks to the media about Pakistan will continue. Gen. Musharraf said a few days ago that if Pakistan is not “doing more” then he would like to know who else is doing what. Ambassador Mahmud Ali Durrani blew his top off with the CNN this week when he said that Pakistan’s critics have only one eye open with which they see Pakistan. The other eye, which should see Afghanistan, is kept tight shut. Clearly, Pakistan is the fall guy for the failures of the US, the NATO forces and the hapless Afghan government.

Having said this, let me also say that the time has come when Pakistan should do some serious soul-searching and get its own house in order. It is also time that Pakistan should decide to end its dependence on the United States and the generous handouts it receives in return for services which never quite manage to please Washington. Is Pakistan a rentier state, which hires out its services to the highest bidder? I would like to think not, but there is much evidence that we may have reduced ourselves to that.

The US has been on average giving $80 million a month to Pakistan in overt assistance and perhaps the same amount under the table. How can a country assert its independence if it is so heavily dependent on outside help? The prosperity that the government shouts about from housetops is illusory. The exchange reserves held by the State Bank are no good to man or beast as economist Nadeem Ul Haque used to say (now that he is GoP, he may have changed his views).

Pakistan should end its dabbling on other people’s backyards and instead of trying to bring peace to the Middle East, it should bring peace to its own people and to that piece of land on which it stands itself. All support to radicalism and radical groups must cease. The writ of the state should be re-established. The Lal Masjid, Islamabad, recapitulation is the latest example of how the state backs down every time it is challenged by the medieval religious establishment.

Our intelligence agencies have earned such a bad name worldwide over the years that they are held responsible for things of which they are quite innocent. Ambassador Durrani tells me that the doctrine of strategic depth has been abandoned by the Pakistan Army. The Afghans would feel more reassured that it indeed is so, were this to come from Gen. Musharraf. The repressive apparatus of the state must be dismantled. Intelligence agencies should have their original mandate and the task for which they were originally created restored. They have no business to plan and manipulate elections. So intrusive and powerful they are today that a civil servant’s promotion to the next grade is dependent on a good chit from “The Boys”. No ambassador can be appointed unless he or she is cleared by them. Incidentally, this last one we owe to the Benazir Bhutto government. She it was who also conferred the Medal of Democracy on the Army.

But let me end this with a quote from a Los Angeles Times editorial published on 1st of March: “The US may well be destined for a long marriage of convenience with Pakistan. But its spouse need not necessarily be named Musharraf.”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Writing is difficult work and writing about music is the most difficult of all, which is why we are in Saeed Malik’s debt for having produced a book that brings together Lahore’s musical history and heritage. Considering what it was and looking at what we are left with today, one can only feel a deep sense of loss.

The great musicians that Lahore once knew are either dead or they have left, and of those that have stayed, their voices are stilled. Ustad Fateh Ali Khan, the prince of Patialia school, rarely performs. Amanat Ali Khan’s son, who inherited some of the sweetness and light that was his father’s voice, frittered away his gift. Others from that house are simply not imbued with the genius that their elders had. Nazakat Ali Khan and Salamat Ali Khan are dead and their heirs can carry forward their musical legacy in name only.

Today, anyone who can get a couple of his friends together and raise the money to buy a guitar or two and a pair of drums becomes a music group. Almost none of them can sing or play. The sound they produce is a bastard sound, neither East nor West. Barring two, possibly three exceptions, the rest of the Pakistani “rock” groups are an embarrassment. That they get an audience is due not to the quality of their music but to the desperation with which the young seek entertainment in an entertainment-famished land that the Mullah is beginning to rule under the benevolent indifference of the state.

Saeed Malik’s Lahore: a musical companion, published thanks to the public-spirited munificence of Syed Babar Ali, sums up the city’s glorious musical past. He laments the departure of non-Muslim musicians in 1947 to India. Manto wrote Toba Tek Singh about the “partition” of the Lahore lunatic asylum. Someone should write about the “partition” of Lahore’s music. Those who went across included Pandit Jeevan Lal Mattoo, the two sisters, Surinder Kaur and Prakash Kaur, and film music composers Shyam Sunder, Amar Nath, Gobind Ram and Dhanni Ram, among others. The great Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and his son Munawwar Ali Khan left for India some years later, a cultural loss that is not possible to quantify, such was its immensity and so impoverished did it leave us.

But we were fortunate in gaining the arrival from India of Roshan Ara Begum, the lady who sang for the gods, though in the presence of mortals; Nazakat and Salamat Ali Khan; the great sarangi player Ustad Bundoo Khan; the scions of the Patiala gharana; Ustad Abdul Waheed Khan of Kairana – he died on a short visit to India – and from among folk singers, that most mellifluous of performers, Tufail Niazi. Khurshid Anwar, who put his unmistakable stamp on every composition he authored, stayed on in Bombay but returned to Lahore a few years into independence.

Saeed Malik recreates things that exist no longer, such as Lahore’s great baithaks and takiyas in the old city, which were the true nurseries of classical music. On Mohni Road, there stood a music school established in 1901 by Pandit Vishnu Digamber, which trained hundreds of serious students, some of whom like GA Farooq became quite famous. Haveli Mian Khan, built in Emperor Shahjehan’s reign, was a Lahore landmark but time wasn’t kind to it. It housed at different times such men as Ustad Kaley Khan, Ustad Eeday Khan and Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, whose grandfather worked at the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. According to Malik, “With the ill-planned horizontal expansion of Lahore, a large number of professional musicians had to shift to other places. No one can now find a practising musician living within or near the precincts of Haveli Mian Khan. The exodus of musicians from the Haveli has depleted the melodic resources of Lahore, affecting the music culture of the Walled City.” Another of Lahore’s depleted music centres was Katri Bawa, which after 1947 became home to the Rubabi clan of musicians.

Saeed Malik describes a Roshan Ara Begum performance in words that I could not agree with more, having heard her at the Open Air Theatre many times. He writes, “She was bestowed with the ability to command instant respect and appreciation from her audience. She did so by using long sweeps of notes, or applying meends , and swinging flights, which were supplemented by her emotion-charged voice. Her manner of voice production contained fullness as well as delicacy. . . She had an extraordinarily keen and subtle perception of sur , so much so that even the slightest lapse from the correct intonation of a note in the rendering of a raga would be seen reflected in a knowing look on her face.” The late Hayat Ahmed Khan would always recite this couplet before bringing on Malika-e-Mauseeqi, “Uss ghairat-e-naheed ki her taan hai Deepak: Shola sa lappak jaaye hai awaz tau dekho .” And she would take her place with a grace that could only be called queenly. I would often see Khurshid Shahid strumming the taanpura behind her, wearing a blazing orange Benarsi sari. Ustad Nathoo Khan would be on the sarangi and the incomparable Ustad Shaukat Hussain on the tabla. When something particularly subtle or difficult that her accompanists had executed pleased her, she would turn her face toward them for a fleeting moment and smile like an angel. She was dark and plain but a strange beauty would irradiate her being when she was performing. She was the queen of the Kalyan thaath and her Jhanjhoti thumri, a tribute to her great ustad Khan Sahib Abdul Karim Khan, was something to die for.

Saeed Malik also recalls perhaps the greatest ghazal singers of all times, Ustad Barkat Ali Khan, whose pupil Ghulam Ali has done him proud. “The adroitness and confidence with which Barkat Ali Khan used to render thumris, dadras and ghazals created a hypnotic spell on his audience . . . His renditions were interspersed with ornamentations. The flourish and ease with which he embellished his compositions with short melodic phrases, intervals, pauses, swings and suspended cadences served as a clear pointer to the command he had over the entire gamut of ghazal singing,” Malik writes. Mukhtar Begum, Agha Hashr’s lifelong love and the older sister of Farida Khanum, who performed the night President Ayub Khan came to the All Pakistan Music Conference, was a perfect singer. So superb was her rendition of both the word and the note that she left her listeners breathless. She would always sing one or more of Agha Hashr’s ghazals with a feeling that could only have sprung out of her love for and devotion to the man who was called “the Indian Shakespeare.”

Saeed Malik also writes about the great composers of film music associated with Lahore, men such as Ustad Jhandhey Khan, Rafiq Ghaznavi, Master Ghulam Haider (who gave the young Marathi girl called Lata her big break), Shyam Sunder and, of course, the one and only, Khurshid Anwar. Ustad Jhandey Khan, born in Jammu or one of its suburbs to a Brahmin family in 1895, is to be remembered for a musical feat never accomplished before or since. All twelve songs of Kedar Sharma’s pre-1947 classic Chitralekha were set to the raag Bhairvin. He composed music for about 30 movies, left Bombay after partition, came to Lahore, composed for two movies and then settled in Gujranwala where he spent the rest of his life in prayer. He is buried in that city that is associated with wrestlers and gangsters. Saeed Malik traced Ustad Jhandey Khan’s daughter in that town in 1982 but writes that “she did not wish to be identified” with her father considering the low esteem with which professional musicians are held in our society.

And that is our shame.

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