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Gen. Ehsan-ul-Haq, on whom I have never set eyes, was in town the week just ended — with four people in tow and that does not include the ambassador — but he might have been on Mars as far I am concerned because despite efforts on behalf of the three or four who write for home papers from here, all I drew was a blank. This now is the established pattern, the SOP which is short for standard operating procedure. The civilians who visit Washington — and some such as de facto finance minister Salman Shah, Muhammad “Rover” Mian Soomro and Prof Ataur Rehman are more here than there — are game as far as we, the native press, is concerned.

They drone on and on and we scribble in our notebooks what half the time we know by heart, having heard it before. When we get back to our desks, we find that most of what we have jotted down is waffle, words, words, words as the Prince of Denmark put it. In all the years I have been scribbling the thoughts and utterances of our high and mighty in my notebook, I have yet to hear, even once, any of them say that whatever he had come for, he had failed to achieve.

Example: I have lost count of visits made to Washington to get Pakistan’s US textile quota improved and an investment deal finalised but, as the priceless Punjabi saying has it, the she-donkey continues to stand where the she-donkey once stood. Has it never occurred to our people (though whose people they are, one sometimes has to wonder) that admitting that something reasonable Pakistan wants has been repeatedly refused would increase the chances of its being accepted, partly if not fully and eventually if not in the immediate future. The problem I think lies with the Pakistani successful-visit syndrome. Every visit abroad every time has to be declared a success, and not just a success but a great success. The question is if we have had nothing but one success after another, why are we in the mess in which we are?

What is true of the regime’s lesser luminaries is even more true of the Dynamic Duo of El Presidente and Shortcut Aziz, though I must not forget Blameworthy “Waiscoat” our own Matternich. Of the half a million foreign visits they have notched up, not one has been less than a great success. The one possible exception could be Agra but those were El Presidente’s early days and, in any case, the blame it was said lay with the perfidious Injuns.

Someone once asked a certain Asian head of state why he almost never went abroad. “That’s simple,” he answered, “I have come to the conclusion that if there is any good I can possibly do to my country and my people, it is by staying at home because it is all here, not there.” Since the Dynamic Duo’s arrival on the scene — and what a scene it has been — I have withdrawn the title of Sinbad Jahazan I once conferred on the Princess of the Poor. She can be prime minister twice more but the bar has been set so high by the Dynamic Duo that she won’t even come anywhere close to it.

But to return to Gen. Haq and his detail, the rule seems to be: ignore the reptiles, which is how the second oldest profession in the world is sometimes referred to. I do not recall a single instance since 1993 — barring three or so years I wasn’t here — when any of the visiting khakis, blues or whites, came anywhere within note-taking distance of any of us. I suppose secrecy becomes second nature to those who don a uniform, except that this desire for secrecy only comes into play when it is the natives. To others they open their hearts out.

Take this visit for instance. Gen Haq was due to speak to a gathering of American “policymakers” and “think tankers” at the Brookings Institution. Questions were to be asked and answered and at the end of the event, interspersed with lunch, those privileged to be the audience would surely have returned to their principles and reported what they had learnt. Since the present crisis began, a number of visitors from Washington have gone to Pakistan to get a feel of things in Islamabad and elsewhere and then reported back. That is perfectly in order and that is how smart governments operate.

It would not have occurred to Gen. Haq or to his handlers that perhaps some of us could have told him a few things he may not have learnt from his hosts. After all, we do happen to have home court advantage. We live here. We may not always get it right but we may not always be wrong either.

A friend of mine is of the view that government functionaries clam up or become standoffish when there is a military government in office. Under even a bad civilian government — and we have not wanted one that count — information access is easier and the attitude of the bureaucracy, civil and military, undergoes an immediate change. When the other kind of government is in power — which appears to be our preordained fate — the shutters come down. No entry. Access denied. Wrong number. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

And so it goes and so it has gone for most of our khaki-streaked history.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

In a country where it is still illegal to photograph a bridge or to be found hanging around the road that leads to the Bum factory, it is amazing that the young female academic Ayesha Siddiqa should have written a book laying bare the Pakistan Army’s inner economy and providing the first documented account of the vast commercial empire it has built with public money. So secretive is Pakistan’s defence establishment that the National Assembly is not permitted – even under civilian governments – to debate its budget or question its spending. Nor is anyone authorised to look into the Army’s enterprises. If anyone is looking for a state within a state, he need not look any further. All he has to do is to come to Pakistan.

Ayesha Siddiqa’s book Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy had long needed to be written but wasn’t because those who had the ability or the knowledge to write it considered discretion the better part of valour. How the Army will react to her findings, I am unable to predict. Since her facts are well supported, I suspect they will simply be ignored. However, I do hope a copy of the book will be available in every station library in every cantonment.

According to the author, the commercial empire of the Pakistan Army has a net worth of Rs 200 billion. The term she has coined for the Army’s commercial and business activities is Milbus, which is shorthand for ‘military business.’ She defines Milbus as military capital used for the personal benefit of the military fraternity, especially the officer cadre, which is not included as part of the defence budget or does not follow the normal accountability procedures of the state, making it an independent genre of capital. It is directly or indirectly controlled by the military. She writes that this unaccounted transfer of resources can take many forms. She lists them as: state land transferred to military personnel, resources spent on perks and privileges for retired personnel, business opportunities diverted to armed forces personnel by flouting the norms of a free market economy, and money lost on training personnel who seek early retirement to join the private sector.

Ayesha Siddiqa maintains that a study of Milbus is important because it causes the officer cadre to be interested in enhancing their influence in the state’s decison making and politics. This military capital also becomes the major driver for the armed forces’ stakes in political control. She writes, “Pakistan’s military today runs a huge commercial empire. Although it is not possible to give a definitive value of the military’s internal economy because of a lack of transparency, the estimated worth runs into billions of dollars. The Fauji Foundation and the Army Welfare Trust are the largest business conglomerates in the country. Besides these, there are multiple channels through which the military acquires opportunities to monopolise national resources.”

Ayesha Siddiqa makes three major points. First, that Milbus is military capital that perpetuates the military’s political predatory style. This capital is concealed, not being recorded as part of the defence budget and it involves unexplained and questionable transfers of resources from the public to the private sector, especially to individuals and groups that have the inside track. Second, the military’s economic predatoriness increases in totalitarian systems. The armed forces encourage policies and related environments that multiply their economic opportunities. Milbus becomes part of the tribute that the military extracts from providing services such as national security. Since the armed forces ensure territorial security, they believe that anything that contributes to their welfare is justified. At times, the military convinces the citizens to bear additional costs on the basis of a conceived or real threat to the state. Third, the military’s economic predatoriness is both a cause and an effect of a feudal, authoritarian and non-democratic political system. In the process of seeking benefits, those in power give a blank cheque to other elite groups to behave in a predatory manner.

The author argues that the elite groups in society have their own reasons to turn a blind eye to the military’s economic interests. In politics dominated by the military, other dominant groups often turn into cronies of the armed forces to establish a mutually beneficial relationship, as has happened in Pakistan every time the military has been in power. Monopolies, caused by illegal military capital result in market distortions, place a burden on the public sector because of the hidden flow of funds from the public to the private sector. Since the military claims Milbus activities to be legitimate, funds are often diverted from the public to the private sector, which can and does include the use of military equipment by military-controlled firms and the acquisition of state land for distribution to individual members of the military fraternity for profit making.

A friend of mine, Tariq Jazy, says that when he looked up the word ‘army’ in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, he found it defined as an “organised force armed for fighting on land.” This definition, he added, he has modified in line with Pakistan’s requirements, and it now reads, “an organised force armed to fight for land.” Ayesha Siddiqa writes that the military is a significant stockholder in agricultural land. Out of the 11.58 million acres that is controlled by the armed forces, an estimated 6.9 million acres, or about 59 percent of the total land, lies in rural areas. The military is the only department of the government that has assumed the authority to redistribute land for the benefit of its officials, having distributed about 6.8 million acres among its cadres for their personal use. When a dispute arose over the Okara farms when the Army wanted to throw out the sharecroppers who had cultivated that land for generations, Army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan said, “The needs of the Army will be decided by the Army itself and/or the government will decide this. Nobody has the right to say what the Army can do with 5,000 acres or 17,000 acres. The needs of the Army will be determined by the Army itself.” So there, in a nutshell, you have it.

Ayesha Siddiqa concludes, “An authoritarian system in which the military has a dominant position is hardly the panacea for Pakistan’s political problems, nor does it help the long-term interests of the country’s strategic external allies. A politically strong Pakistan will also be a stable Pakistan, which will not be detrimental to the South Asian region or the world at large.” She also points out that the military has been central in nourishing the religious right without necessarily realising the strength of religious ideology as an alternative to itself.

But let me close this with another observation from my friend, Tariq Jazy. “In Pakistan, the military has been civilianised and the civilians have been militarised.”

The State Department, so chirpy in the past on Pakistan and the president’s “tight” friend, has recently taken a vow of silence in relation to its “frontline ally in the global war against terrorism”.

Phone calls made to the Foggy Bottom defoggers, in other words, the officers dealing with our patch of South Asia find them on voicemail. The press relations unit has nothing to say. Nine out of ten times, you don’t get to talk to anyone. And when you do, he or she tells you to call later. When you do, all you get is a couple of measly, meaningless, hypocritical clichés. The moral of the story: this is what comes of placing all your eggs in one basket.

The other day Stephen Cohen, easily the most astute analyst of what ails Pakistan and what has ailed Pakistan since 1947, said that the Bush administration has made no attempt to make contact with either Benazir Bhutto or Nawaz Sharif. In other words, all the eggs the White House had (including eggs found in the bushes where children look for them every Easter) it has put in just that one khaki-coloured basket, leaving none for any other. Unlike our academics (except those running the two or three think tanks for the Invisible Soldiers’ Inc.) who are kept outside the loop by the government, in America, academics and experts are consulted and what they say is taken seriously and employed to shape or modify important policy issues, especially related to foreign relations.

What Cohen says is not his opinion, but information he has. My information is from the other side of the tracks and I do know that no US official of consequence has seen Benazir Bhutto, notwithstanding all the visits she makes to this country. One should add that she is not without friends in Washington. I am not sure if she has sought meetings and not got them, but it is a fact that no one in official America has reached out to her. As for Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, he has not so far been to America. Some months ago when he applied for a visa to attend the wedding of a close family friend’s daughter in New York, the timeframe he was given was such that he did not pursue the matter. A decision on his visa was promised long past the wedding date. Some would see it as a diplomatic way of saying no. Cohen, therefore, is right. No contact.

Is it any wonder then that the State Department and even the White House are so reticent about Pakistan. The White House press secretary, Tony Snow, when asked the other day about the situation in Pakistan, said he was not going to get into it. On another occasion, he mouthed some meaningless cliché, as did the State Department spokesman. A former American diplomat told some people a couple of days ago that the parlour game now underway in Washington is called “After Musharraf who?’ To which I add ‘and how’.

Is it possible that the US may at long last is going to learn a lesson it has so far refused to learn, namely that doing business with one-man governments is far easier, except when they begin to totter. The trouble with “one-man bands” is that there is no provision for succession. A civilian government may be inefficient, confused and even corrupt, but in case the person heading it leaves the scene, the system takes over. In a military government the only system is the man heading the system. The man goes: the system goes.

That happened in Pakistan when Ayub Khan was overthrown. It happened to Yahya and it happened after Zia disappeared from the scene. Is the US exercising its influence to urge the General to step aside in favour of a neutral interim set-up, under whose aegis free and fair elections could be held for the first time in the history of Pakistan? Frankly, I don’t know and I don’t think US policymakers have so far got their act together.

The Bush administration is not a lame duck. It is a legless duck, assailed by problems. Everything that could go wrong in Iraq has gone wrong. There is more to come. The Congress is enemy-controlled and increasing its pressure on a president who not only looks harried, but who is actually harried. Things are going to get both hot and tight for him for the rest of his days in office.

So let us turn to astrology. My astrologer friend tells me that since Pakistan came to birth under the most unhelpful sign of the zodiac, the same stellar juxtaposition that is now playing tricks up there in the skies, we are in for a whole lot of trouble and turmoil. One does not have to be an astrologer to make that summation: any one with a brain and a pair of eyes will come to the same conclusion.

I ask him about the General. “Not good,” he says mournfully, “not good at all.” “And when do the stars go elsewhere to blight some other country and its headman?” I ask. No respite this summer, he replies. And the summer of course has just begun. My friend the stargazer sips his mineral water through a straw. He has no more to say.

But let me end this on a lighter note. Thank God, Pakistan’s energy problem has at last been solved. Maulana Abdul Aziz of the Red Mosque says, “The power shortage in the country will end if the ruling class, military and police stop ironing their clothes.” At least, now we know what cost we have had to pay to keep Shortcut in those crisply-ironed suits of his.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Sialkot, which earns a good deal of the money that enables Gen. Musharraf and Shortcut Aziz to cruise around the world on missions whose precise benefit is known either to the Almighty or to the two Sinbads, has been neglected by almost every government that has come into office since 1947. Those of its sons – or the odd daughter or two – who have gone places, ranging from Khawaja Muhammad Safdar to Chaudhri Anwar Aziz and fils “Gorbachev” Aziz to the goal-scoring umpire, Chaudhry Amir Hussain of the National Assembly, have done little more than visiting the city or the district for reasons that only the most generous would docket under public service.

Iqbal’s poetry and his “message” have official benediction, but the city where he was born and where he went to school has failed to receive much official attention. Monstrous buildings have been raised in the poet’s name in Lahore – though what happens in them remains a mystery. The home where he was born is still standing only through divine intervention. Why it has not crumbled and fallen to the ground continues to baffle the people of Sialkot. The Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways. The other Sialkoti, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, ostracised in life by the establishment, has since been adopted, being dead and thus safe, but it has not occurred to anyone to do anything for the city that Faiz always felt drawn to, especially in his last years, once even seriously considering a return to the streets where he had played as a child.

Sialkot is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of sports goods, and has been for nearly a century. It has also specialised in making surgical instruments, now used in some of the best hospitals of the world. For years and years, the business community of the city, led by its exporters, urged every government that came to office (legally or otherwise) to build an airport that would enable export goods to be flown out expeditiously and without the hassle and the expense, in time and money, that transportation to Lahore or Karachi entails. The answer every time was no. The philosopher kings who have ruled Pakistan, it turns out, were advised by their court ministers, including their jesters, that since Sialkot was practically on the border with Jammu, it would undermine national security to build an airport there. On that basis, the airport at Lahore should also have been decommissioned and handed over to those who are more interested in building defence colonies than defence.

Finally, the businessmen of the city joined hands under the umbrella of the Sialkot Chamber of Commerce and Industry, each contributing Rs 5 million of his own money to build an international airport that would handle both passenger and cargo traffic. There are 223 directors and the membership is now closed. The airport will be able to take a fully loaded Boeing 747 and heavy cargo aircraft. In other words, Sialkot has set an example of civic leadership and responsibility that other cities of Pakistan that continue to suffer government neglect can and will one day follow. The Chamber is also building city roads that the municipality won’t, the first completed being the famous Paris Road that I once called home.

However, it is not only their own government that gives the people of Sialkot less than their due, but foreign governments too, principally that of the United States, that have initiated a policy of discrimination against businessmen from Sialkot since 9/11. Last March, the Pakistani Sports Goods Manufacturers and Exporters Association invited two officials from the US embassy in Islamabad to visit the city so that they could be told in plain words what was going on and how the new US visa policy had affected Sialkot’s exports. In a memorandum read out by the chairman of the Association, Professor Safdar Sandel, the two officials were informed that the US embassy was acting arbitrarily and refusing business visas even to those who had always travelled abroad to meet their customers and pick up fresh orders.

Sandel said, “It has been observed that sometimes some very genuine or deserving applicants have been refused a visa, whereas sometimes people with not so sound a background have been granted visas.” He said, “I know persons with 35 years of business background and travelling experience who have been refused visas although they had visited the United States several times before.” He went on to state that young unmarried business travellers had been refused visas, adding, “To be a bachelor is no disqualification. In fact, young people have a greater urge to do hard work.” He urged the US embassy to issue visas to anyone who came with a recommendatory letter from the Chamber. He said the only reason businessmen from Sialkot journeyed abroad was to make new contacts, cement old ties and explore fresh avenues. They were always in a rush to return home, he added, so that they could supervise the preparation of orders they had secured. He told the two US embassy officials that many of those present in that very room where they were sitting had travelled abroad thirty to forty times. And yet some of them had been refused a US visa since 9/11.

Sandel pooh poohed the US embassy’s oft-imposed requirement that in order to obtain a visa, a businessman must produce an “invitation” from an American business establishment. He argued that it is not incumbent on American business people to send an invitation to their Pakistani counterparts. “They may send it or they may not send it. They like sometimes not to have time for such trivialities,” he added. He also pointed out the absurdity of the US imposing the rule that if a visa is refused, the applicant must wait for two months before reapplying.

I will be surprised if the very sensible suggestions made by the Sialkot Chamber’s chairman will have had much effect on the US embassy, which like most other Western embassies, treats Pakistani visa applicants as potential suspects. The humiliation to which they are subjected should be unacceptable in any civilised country. Everyone recalls how Dr Javid Iqbal was treated by the US embassy when he applied for a visa a couple of years ago. The Pakistan government is neither interested in how its people are treated on their own soil, nor does it have the courage to act in like manner when an American or European citizen applies for a Pakistani visa. The moral of this story is clear. If you do not respect yourself yourself, no one else should be expected to respect you.

The 9/11 attacks have changed America in ways that would have been impossible to imagine some years ago. They have led to the establishment of a “Fortress America” mentality, as if the nation were in a state of siege. What was the world’s most open, the most welcoming society, has become fearful of even itself. Everyone and everything is bathed in the murky light of suspicion. Everyone has to carry identity papers and show them on demand. Many places demand two “picture IDs”. No two picture IDs, a no entry.

The number of places where you can enter without proper identification is dwindling. At this rate, it is only a matter of time before entry to stores and restaurants is also made dependent on the production of a “picture ID.” When you travel on the Metro or underground city transport, as I do in Washington all the time — cabs are expensive and never around when you need one — you frequently hear chilling announcements instructing you what to do if you see a suspicious package or notice anything suspicious. I always have a book to read on the train, but have learnt to avoid carrying one which is in Urdu. Who knows it might be mistaken for an Al Qaeda training manual, until proved otherwise.

There have been scores of incidents when passengers have refused to travel on the same aircraft on which there is someone who “looks suspicious, is speaking a strange language and is looking nervous and restless”. Such passengers have been taken off flights and if they have later been apologised to, I at least have not heard of it or seen it reported in the press. Beards and unkempt ones — to which one should object on aesthetic rather than other grounds — are cause for possible trouble. If you have an unkempt beard and you are in non-Western attire and if on top of that you are fidgety, you may have questions to answer. A person may be fidgety because he is nervous when flying. Many people are.

The case of the five or six imams who were careless enough to hold congregational prayers in the passengers’ lounge of an airport before take off, and were made to leave the plane, is well known. The airline did not apologise. They were thoroughly interrogated and made to prove their credentials. Some of them have since sued the airline but it remains to be seen if they will have better luck with the judge than they had with the captain of the aircraft who phoned security and had the men removed.

The other day, Thomas Fuentes, head of the FBI’s office of international operations told a group of journalists that after the 9/11 attacks, the Europeans said that while it was the first time such a thing had happened on American soil, Europe had been dealing with the scourge of terrorism for a long time. The European reaction has been far more mature and far cooler than that of the US. There is no sense of panic there and although excellent security measures are in place, you don’t experience or come across the feeling of fear that you notice here. The US declared “war on terrorism”, as if terrorism were the name of a country or a nation. Al Qaeda is a bunch of criminals and that is how it should have been dealt with.

An FBI advisory this week is indicative of the fortress mentality that 9/11 has given birth to. The advisory relates to weapons of mass destruction and warns that the “threat” of chemical, biological, and radiological/nuclear material being used to attack the United States is “real”. “And Al-Qaeda has openly pursued WMD and would likely use any weapons they build or buy against our nation,” it adds.

There is now in the Bureau a new Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate that “focuses on preventing agro-terrorism, bio-terrorism, chemical terrorism, and the use of nuclear and radiological weapons”. The Bureau goes on to offer “a vulnerability assessment for at-risk businesses and organisations (such as chemical plants) to point out potential security weak spots and suspicious warning signs”.

The FBI goes on to advise that in order to ascertain if a business or facility is under threat of attack, answers to the following questions should be sought: “Are you getting phone calls asking about your use of security guards, your operating hours, and your total number of employees? Have you gotten any bomb threats lately (they could be security probes)? Is someone taking pictures of your facilities? Watching with binoculars? Taking notes? Are people fishing around for information about your products but can’t explain what they’re going to use them for? Are potential customers unaware of basic safe handling practices for dangerous materials and willing to pay cash for large orders? Do customers want delivery to a non-operating facility or other suspicious location?”

As long as Bush is in the White House, there is no likelihood of America regaining the confidence in itself that it always has been known for. As the beleaguered president’s troubles deepen, so will the atmosphere of doom and gloom in which he has plunged this country, fighting a war at home and two abroad, none of which he is winning.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent. His e-mail is khasan2@cox.net

One of Madam Nur Jehan’s great regrets, and one she took to her grave in the sandy earth of Karachi, a city she had no feeling for, was that her illness and the insistence of her daughters and doctors had forced her to stay away from Lahore, which she loved. It was where she could feel the evening breeze blowing in from the town of Kasur where she was born and which she never forgot. What a lovely miracle it is that two people who brought such immense joy to the world, the saint Bulleh Shah and Nur Jehan, both belonged to Kasur, as Kasur belongs to them.

In the 1980s, when Nur Jehan returned to Lahore after a heart operation in the United States, she said she was unable to express the joy and the feeling of well-being that came to her the moment she stepped on the soil of Lahore. “The gentle breeze of Lahore touched my face and I knew I was home and I was well,” she said. I asked Husain Haqqani, who used to visit her during her last illness at her daughter Hina and her son-in-law, Olympian hockey star Hasan Sardar’s house, why Madam was buried in Karachi and not brought to Lahore and taken to Kasur where she wanted to lie. He told me that her daughters felt it would be auspicious to bury her on the day she had died because it was the twenty-seventh day of Ramadan. “But didn’t they know that Nur Jehan, the light of the world, was among the blessed of the earth because not every day does God bestow such talent on a mortal?” I asked.

A few years earlier, in an interview for BBC, Nur Jehan said that she had never been afraid of death because she believed that whereas life is an illusion, death is the truth. She said her faith in God is deep because to Him belongs all life and He does what He considers best. “It is my duty to beseech Him and His supreme will to give because even alms have to be begged for. I have always felt connected to God.” In one of her last conversations, she spoke about spurious drugs that both Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and she had been administered. “What greater shame can there be that for a handful of coins some people should play with the lives of others?” she asked.

Hamid Mir in a tribute to Madam after her death recounted a conversation he once had with revolutionary poet Habib Jalib. He asked Jalib why it was that while movie producers and music directors had to await their turn to be received by Madam, all he had to do was make a phone call and be welcomed. He laughed and said, “This is the same question that I put to Madam once. I said to her that though she is a woman, she allows no man to get the better of her and she never minces her words – including four-letter ones – if someone displeases her, even if he is a big shot producer. But she always ignores what I say even when I am being impertinent.” She replied, “Jalib sahib, a love affair with you I can rule out because you simply do not have it in you to undergo the scandal and the suffering that love requires. All you do is versify the truth, get roughed up by police and end up locked in jail. It is my honour to be nice to such crazy men of principle as you.” Some time later, Jalib saw a picture in a newspaper that showed General Zia-ul-Haq holding Madam’s hand in both of his close to his heart. Jalib immediately got on the phone, “Madam, what are you doing holding hands with a man whom I denounce in my verse every day?” Nur Jehan replied, “Zia sahib it was who took my hand in his. If you come, I will take your hand in mine, I promise.” Jalib lost no time arriving at Madam’s house. Nur Jehan held his hand in hers, while Jalib recited his defiant poem about his refusal to describe darkness as light, man as God, stone as diamond etc. Not only did Nur Jehan ask him to recite it several times, but she called in a photographer and told Jalib, “Now you can have this picture printed in every newspaper. I fear no general’s wrath.”

Hundreds of tributes were paid to Madam Nur Jehan after her death, one of the most eloquent being that by Jamiluddin Aali. He wrote, “Had I been a Hindu, I would have declared Madam Nur Jehan an avatar sent by the Great Creator, but there can be no doubt that she was a gift from heaven which is conferred on mortals only after centuries. She has left us with the treasure of her voice, which will become the cultural heritage of the entire world. Nature is munificent in what it confers on us and the fact is that this was Nur Jehan’s century, and she was its bride.”

Madam was her own person. She once told me that she had become Nur Jehan because of her own hard work. I wrote that she was women’s lib before there was a women’s lib, and that is a fact. She had no illusions about the contempt in which men hold women in our society and she lived life on her own terms and let no man take advantage of her.

Ali Sufyan Afaqi has recorded a unique story about Nur Jehan. On a visit to Dhaka, she stayed at the only nice hotel in the city in those days, Hotel Shahbagh. The food served to her was so good (she herself was a fantastic cook), that she asked to see the chef. When he came, she complimented him and asked what he would like. He said, “Madam, we love your voice but we hardly ever are able to go to the cinema. If you want to reward me, please sing a few songs for the hotel’s working staff.” She promised to do that after an early evening engagement. When she returned to the hotel, she learned that the management had invited what it called the “higher gentry” of Dhaka for the promised evening. She was furious. “I did not invite them; so send them packing or I will do that myself,” she told the manager. After the bewildered and bejewelled ladies and their self-important husbands had been told to go home, she appeared and sang till the small hours of the morning for the cooks, waiters and workers of the hotel and their families.

That was Madam Nur Jehan, the once and forever queen.

Ryszard Kapusciñski, the legendary reporter who died in Prague in January, has been mourned around the world. There was nobody quite like him and such a unique and exquisite chronicler of events, indeed the human condition itself, he was that his name was seriously proposed by many for a Nobel Prize in literature years in running. That he did not get one is a reflection on the poor judgment of the Nobel Prize committee that has often awarded the prize to writers whose name nobody can ever remember, nor are their books ever read after the initial flurry.

Someone once defined a foreign correspondent as one who is trying to rush into a country from where everyone else is trying to get out. Kapusciñski, the sole and indefatigable foreign correspondent of the Polish News Agency to practically the rest of the world, but especially to Africa and Latin America, covered more revolutions, coup d’etats, upheavals, human and man-made tragedies and events that become history though one never realises it at the time, than any other man or woman in this line of work. Nobody was more surprised than him when the world recognised his genius. Suddenly, his books were being translated in every language, more than thirty by the last count. He was invited to write for the most select of the world’s select magazines and he was a celebrity in Europe, no less than in Africa, his first love and obsession, and wherever people valued great writing.

If one were to go about the job of gathering ecumenisms about Kapuœciñski, one would need a far thicker notebook than he ever carried. In fact, he carried two notebooks. In one he kept notes for his run-of-the-mill news agency stories (when, where, who, what, why) and in the other his reflections and observations about places and people. He was once described — and rightly too — as a writer who combines the best of Hemingway and Garcia Marquez — incidentally one of his great friends — and his dispatches as not just reportage but intense, lyrical writing.

One magazine wrote about him, “Every rare, rare once in a while, a writer comes along of such power, such extraordinary gifts, that one feels not only gladdened to partake of his work, but privileged.” The Los Angeles Times called him “one of the great journalists of our time”, describing his “journalistic encounters and his unexpected discoveries in the roughest parts of the world” as “vivid”. The word vivid does poor justice to what Kapusciñski brought to his readers. He took them right there in the African night and the Bolivian jungle, breathing the air and trying to stay alive against all odds.

During the Nigerian Civil War, Kapusciñski was told that he must not venture into a certain part of the country because no white man could ever emerge out of it alive. Kapusciñski went right in to try to find out if that indeed was true. He lived through twenty-seven revolutions and military takeovers. No one has chronicled the demise of colonialism in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s and the dawn of freedom in that vast, horribly exploited continent than Kapuœciñski. One of his best-known pieces of writing is his account of the short and bloody war that erupted between Honduras and El Salvador over, well, a football match.

He once wrote, “In the tropics the white feels weakened, or downright weak, whence comes the heightened tendency to outbursts of aggression. People who are polite, modest or even humble in Europe fall easily into rage here, get into fights, destroy other people, start feuds, fall prey to megalomania, grow touchy about their prestige and significance and go around completely devoid of self-criticism, bragging about the position and the influence they have at home.”

Among his best known works are “The Emperor”, which is about the decline and fall of the anachronistic empire of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia, the “Shah of Shahs”, which chronicles the fall of Reza Shah Pahlavi, and “Imperium”, a book about the last days of the Soviet Union.

Salman Rushdie said of Kapuœciñski, “One Kapusciñski is worth more than a thousand whimpering and fantasising scribblers. His exceptional combination of journalism and art allows us to feel so close to what Kapusciñski calls the inexpressible true image of war.” Once he told an interviewer that he really wrote for “people everywhere still young enough to be curious about the world”. He has been called the “Herodotus of our times”, “Translator of the World” and “Third World chronicler” but no title can adequately convey the power and immediacy of Kapusciñski’s writing. In his early years, he reported briefly from India and Pakistan, though I have not found any record of his dispatches.

In an interview to Granta magazine, Kapusciñski spoke about his fascination for Africa:

“I was there in Africa because I found it so compelling. I was aware that I was seeing something unique, for I was there at an important historical moment: the liberation of Africa — when African nations everywhere were declaring their independence. I wish I could convey what Africa was like. I have experienced nothing like it. Africa has its own personality. Sometimes it is a sad personality, sometimes impenetrable, but always unrepeatable. Africa was dynamic. It was aggressive, on the attack. And I liked that. Afterwards, now, finding myself in quiet surroundings, amid conditions of stability, in Europe, I become bored.”

Here is Kapusciñski describing his life as a foreign correspondent: “Pack the suitcase. Unpack it, pack it, unpack it, pack it, typewriter (Hermes Baby), passport (SA 323273), ticket, airport, stairs, airplane, fasten seat belt, take off, unfasten seat belt, flight, rocking, sun, stars, space, hips of strolling stewardesses, sleep, clouds, falling engine speed, fasten seat belt, descent, circling, landing, earth, unfasten seat belts, stairs, airport, immunisation book, visa, customs, taxi, streets, houses, people, hotel, key, room, stuffiness, thirst, otherness, foreignness, loneliness, waiting, fatigue, life.”

“You must choose your words carefully,” Kapusciñski once said, “because there are so many of them in the world.”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Amrita Sher Gil was once asked by Iqbal Singh, who was to write her biography 43 years after her death in Lahore in 1941, at the age of 28, why she had never painted a portrait of Jawaharlal Nehru, whom she knew and liked. She replied, “Because he is too good looking.” And so he was, and so was she. Col Ronny Datta, who as aide-de-camps to President Radhakrishnan, would often get to see Nehru, told me once that there was always such a glow on Nehru’s face that you couldn’t keep your eyes on it for long.

Amrita met Nehru in Lahore when he came for a day to team up with Congress workers and address a public meeting. He was staying in a house just across the road from Faletti’s Hotel with Diwan Ram Lal, a judge of the Punjab High Court, and elder brother of Dewan Chaman Lal, with whom and with his wife Helen, Amrita was great friends. Nehru, Ram Lal, Dr Khan Sahib, elder brother of Frontier Gandhi Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, had shared a flat in London as students. Although Nehru and Amrita met no more than three times, they often exchanged letters. As her most recent biographer Yashodhara Dalmia has written, “The exact nature of their relationship is difficult to gauge, because many of Nehru’s letters were later burnt by Amrita’s parents, much to her chagrin, while she was away in Budapest getting married” to her cousin Karl. Her mother was Hungarian and her father a Sikh landlord from Punjab, Sardar Umrao Singh Majithia. (It is to be wondered if the Majithia Hall on Empress Road in Lahore has some connection to Amrita’s father’s family.)

She wrote to her father after learning what had happened, “I had left them behind not because I thought them dangerous witnesses to my evil past but because I didn’t wish to increase my already heavy luggage. However, I suppose I have to resign myself to a bleak old age unrelieved by the entertainment that the perusal of old love letters would have afforded it.”

Nehru sent her a copy of his autobiography. She thanked him and wrote, “As a rule I dislike biographies and autobiographies. They ring false. Pomposity and exhibitionism. But I think I will like yours. You are able to discard your halo occasionally. You are capable of saying, ‘When I saw the sea for the first time,’ when others would say, ‘When the sea saw me for the first time.’ I should have liked to know you better. I am always attracted to people who are integral enough to be inconsistent without discordance and who don’t trail viscous threads of regret behind them. I don’t think that it is on the threshold of life that one feels chaotic, it is when one has crossed the threshold that one discovers that things which looked simple and feelings that felt simple are infinitely more tortuous and complex. That it is only in inconsistency that there is any consistency. But of course you have got an orderly mind. I don’t think you were interested in my paintings really. You looked at my pictures without seeing them. You are not hard. You have got a mellow face. I like your face, it is sensitive, sensual and detached at the same time.”

Amrita moved to Lahore in August 1941. Four months later she was dead. She and Victor rented flat No 23 in Sir Ganga Ram Mansion (I wonder who lives there now), which was also known as Exchange Mansion. She could see the Lahore High Court from the back of the flat. Her husband, who was a doctor, set up his clinic on the ground floor while Amrita made the barsati on top into her studio. She was full of enthusiasm and the artist’s block that she had been struggling with seemed to at last be lifting. She was all set to hold her exhibition in December (it was held after her death) at Faletti’s, where she had exhibited her paintings in 1937. Khushwant Singh who had set up a law practice in Lahore used to hold a fortnightly soiree at his residence where he would be joined by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Prof Ahmed Shah Bokhari, Kartar Sing Duggal, Amrita Pritam Kaur, GD Khosla and Mangat Rai (brother of the long-serving principal of Kinnaird College, the late Miss Mangat Rai). In Lahore also lived artists like Abdul Rehman Chughtai, Satish Gujral and Roop Krishna. Amrita became friends with Nawab Muzaffar Ali Qizalbash, Jamil Asghar, who later became a high court judge, Rashid Ahmed (who married Zeenat Rashid and whose daughter is married to Javed Jabbar “JJ”), U Karamet (who as Vice Chancellor of the Punjab University would sign papers with a flourish that said: “OK – UK”) and AS Bokhari.

Amrita’s reputation as an artist who combined the best of European technique and tradition with the purest of Indian motifs and the Indian spirit, continues to soar. Her work, which now fetches high prices, sold little during her life and the few she sold did not bring in more than a few hundred rupees (One of her paintings, “Veena Players,” hangs in the Lahore Museum and one in the Contemporary Art Gallery in Islamabad, gifted to its founder Zubaida Agha by Ishfaq Ahmed, who picked it up for a few rupees from a junk dealer).

A mystery has always surrounded Amrita’s death. Did she die of food poisoning (she had been at Sir and Lady Abdul Qadir’s home for tea, where she had eaten some pakoras that seem not to have agreed with her) or was it something more sinister? Khushwant Singh – as is his wont – had not written about her very kindly. He says she had an abortion which was botched by her husband and the ensuing infection went out of control. Victor did not seek help until it was too late. Yashodhara Dalmia writes that Helen Chaman Lal found Amrita dying. Two doctors, Dr Sikri and Dr Kalisch, a German, were brought in and found that peritonitis had set in and her intestines had perforated. Around midnight on December 5, 1941 Amrita Sher Gil passed away.

Her father and mother, who were in Simla, rushed to Lahore and on December 7, her father wrote in a letter, “Amrita’s body was taken to the crematory. Those fingers which had painted and that brain which had conceived her works, receiving its inspiration from the deathless spirit, were dissolving into the elements before our eyes. She had entered the prenatal world at Lahore and death seemed to have conspired with life to release her spirit from its physical chrysalis in the same city.” Iqbal Singh, who obviously was smitten by the lovely and fancy-free Amrita, wrote, “Amrita’s body was carried in a black hearse. It was covered with a Kashmiri shawl. At the last moment, someone discovered that no arrangement had been made to get any flowers to lay on the body. Some friends, who had gardens in their houses, rushed and brought some flowers. There were not many mourners – perhaps about 30 or 40, and they were mostly in their cars. So the cortege moved pretty fast through the Mall, Lower Mall, past the Badshahi Mosque and the Lahore Fort, and then on to the burning ghat on the left bank of the Ravi. A brief religious ceremony, under the Sikh rites, was held. . . The last rite was performed by Amrita’s father, Umrao Singh. As I sat there watching the body of that precious, elegant and beautiful Amrita being consumed by the leaping flames, I remember saying to myself, and the conviction has grown through the years – ‘We shall never see the like of her again.’”

Amrita Sher-Gil is one with the earth of Lahore. Is there no one in this city that she chose as home to build a memorial to her, or at least put a plaque at 23 Sir Ganga Ram Mansion in remembrance of a painter who has left her mark on the world in which she was not destined to live very long?

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