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This is Ahmad Faraz’s week as he lies in a Chicago hospital, fighting back, refusing to go gently into the night.

Sometimes prayers do get answered and this may well be one of those moments, because for the first time since July 7 when he entered hospital, he managed this week, with help from his attendants, to actually sit in a chair and remain there sitting for two full hours. But hopes that it could perhaps be the beginning of his journey on the long road to recovery were dashed later in the week when a hospital source described his condition as “irreversible” following the massive stroke he suffered while in hospital.

Poets, Ghalib said, are connected to a world that is not visible to the rest of us. Since that must be so, there have to be powers of which we have neither awareness nor understanding, but could we still hope that they will begin to smile on Faraz, the muse’s favourite son? Such a hope cannot be entertained, going by what one has been told. Are we going to lose Faraz, the supreme poet of romance, whose poetry we have loved and lived with all these years? It is a horrible thought and I want to banish it.

There is little doubt that there are few love letters written in long, stealthy hand by shy girls that do not bear one or more of Faraz’s verses. Challenged once at a mushaira held to honour protesting women to recite poetry dedicated to women, Faraz replied, “But all my poetry is dedicated to women.” Such a lover of the finer things in life needs must live and provide sweetness and light to what Faiz called “this land of yellow leaves”.

Ahmed Faraz is a national treasure and although he does not believe in kings or the succession system, let it be said that if there is one successor to Faiz, it is none other than Faraz. Like Faiz he has endured much persecution and received much love. Last year, and not for the first time, Faraz was persecuted by the regime of “enlightened moderation”.

In Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s time, which of all times should have been and in many ways was, Faraz’s, he was suspended from service by Maulana Kausar Niazi for a single verse of his that asked the books that advocate hate in the name of religion to be cast aside once for all. This misstep was soon corrected.

Faraz suffered imprisonment and persecution under Zia and was so heartbroken that he left the country like Faiz and lived in exile for six years. His great poem Mohasra (The Siege) remains one of the most powerful indictments of military rule. Who else but Faraz could have written: Peshavar qatilo tum sipahi nahin (Soldiers you are not, you professional assassins).

There can be no question that Faraz is also the greatest romantic Urdu poet of our times. But why do we treat our best and brightest so disgracefully, we should sometimes ask ourselves. Faiz was hounded all his life, except during the Bhutto years. Habib Jalib was jailed more than once. Ustad Daman was hunted as if he were a criminal. The progressive writers’ movement and its members were singled out for imprisonment and persecution as soon as Pakistan came into being. Why?

In 2006, angered by something Faraz had written, the minions of the regime had him and his family evicted from their Islamabad house, their belongings placed on the street. There was a nationwide uproar and the government pulled in its horns but did not apologise. Last year, Faraz was dismissed from his post as head of the National Book Foundation on the orders of “Shortcut” Aziz, Citibank’s gift to Pakistan. He is now gone but that infamous act is what he will forever be remembered for.

Faraz has always had the courage to remain to the left of every military regime, while many of our leading literary lights have taken the path of least resistance and keeled over. Faraz said in an interview last year, “I am against dictatorship and military rule. The time has not yet arrived when I should escape from the country out of fear. I will stay home and fight.” Faraz remained involved in the movement to restore the illegally dismissed judges and used his influence to persuade fellow writers to join the protest.

Asked once, when Zia was in power, why he had left Pakistan, he replied that he was in Karachi when an order was served on him, externing him from the province of Sindh. “I said to myself, ‘What have we come to when a man is exiled from his own land! Today, it is Karachi, tomorrow it will be Peshawar, the day after, Lahore. That is when I decided to leave.’”

He also returned the Hilal-i-Imtiaz conferred on him. When asked why he had kept it for two years, he replied, “Do you think it laid eggs in those two years?” I know of no one who can match Faraz’s wit. Let me recount some vintage Faraz stories.

One day Faraz heard loud banging at his door. He rose hurriedly to open it, only to see four or five bearded men in white skullcaps. “Can you recite the Kalima?” one asked. “Why, has it changed?” Faraz inquired.

Once when Faraz was staying at a Karachi hotel, Kishwar Naheed landed there with two of her women friends and announced as soon as they entered the room that they were all famished. Faraz picked up the phone and told room service, “Please send up some sand. The witches are already here.”

Faraz was once asked about the difference between Pakistan in 1947 and Pakistan today. “In 1947, the name of the Muslim League president was Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Today it is Chaudhry Gujrat Hussain.”

And then there is this Faraz story. A man is walking through a jungle on a dark night, when he is startled by a rustling noise in the bushes. “Who is that?” he asks, frightened. “An evil spirit,” answers a woman’s sweet voice. “Then come and possess me, what are you waiting for!” he says.

Husain Haqqani, who remembers more of Faraz than perhaps Faraz himself, phoned to tell me midweek that he had called Asif Zardari and the government was going to take care of the Chicago hospital expenses. All three, Zardari, Gilani and he, had also sent Faraz flowers. “Recite me two of your favourite Faraz verses,” I asked him. Here is what he recited:

Ye kaisa vasl hai tu samnay hai aur hamain

Shumar ab se judai ki saa’tain karnain

Ye kya ke sub se bayan dil ki haaltain karnain

Faraz tum ko na aayain mohabattain karnain

(What a union of ours is this! Here you are sitting across from me and here I am, already counting the moments of separation. You speak to all the world of what your heart is going through: Faraz, you never did learn how to love.”)

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

(Daily Times)

While there have been books - some anonymous and others published under their authors’ names - about life in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, they have mostly been of the “inside the harem” variety: flippant and forgettable, not to mention the predictable in their narratives. So when I learnt of Qanta Ahmed’s book In the Land of Invisible Women I was curious; firstly because she was of Pakistani origin and a woman, and secondly because she was a professional - a doctor - who had been living and working in the United States before she accepted an offer from a major Saudi hospital. For the next two years, she lived in the Kingdom, and on her return she put down her experiences as a single woman in Saudi Arabia’s restrictive, male-dominated, ultra conservative society in a book which has just been published by a small publishing house in Illinois.

There are two things doctors are known for: illegible handwriting that only pharmacists can read and a lack of writing skill. While I have not seen Qanta Ahmed’s penmanship – or should it be, in this age of gender equality, penwomanship or even penpersonship – she can write; although at times her descriptions are indistinguishable from the gushy, overwrought ones that are the hallmark of women’s magazines. This is how she describes Ghadah, a Saudi dietician: “Ghadah has deep, shining, brown saucers for eyes surmounted by long, phaoronic eyebrows and flawless creamy skin. She bubbled with joy. Impala-like, Ghadah was spectacularly beautiful. White gold jewellery adorned her throat, wrists, slender fingers, and ears, reflecting against her luminous porcelain complexion, glinting with every animation.” The book is rich in such descriptions. I think it was V S Naipaul who said that good writing should not attract attention to itself; and that is one opinion of his that I am in agreement with. He still remains unforgiven for having hijacked our Nadira Khanum Alvi, although Muhammad Khalid Akhtar was of the view that actually it may have been the other way around.

But to return to Qanta. She lived in a guarded compound and worked in the intensive care ward of a major hospital during the day or whenever called. She made friends with Saudi women, some of them highly qualified doctors who had studied abroad but had come back home, married men chosen by their parents and become invisible, except to those they worked with and their families. Most of them seemed quite happy with their situation. Others were not so sure. Behind high walls, when women were among women, they displayed all the finery, gold and diamonds that were de rigueur for their social class. Every family had maids: Sri Lankans, Filipinas and Malyasians. Since women are not allowed to drive, they had to be chauffeured around - that honour being bestowed upon Pakistanis or Indians. However, if an Indian who happened to be a Hindu or a Buddhist died in the Kingdom, he had to be flown out, since Saudi soil, it was believed, cannot be contaminated with the remains of a non-believer. In addition, the only places of worship permitted in the Kingdom are mosques. And yet were the right to build a mosque denied to Muslims, Arab or non-Arab, in a Western country, all hell would break loose.

Qanta writes that over time, the Wahabi stance towards innovation has evolved into a number of laws designed to subjugate and oppress women. Citing Sharia, the clerics ban women from driving cars, buying music, and booking hotel rooms in their own names; and have tried but failed to dissuade female car passengers from wearing seat belts for fear of defining their veiled cleavage. The clerical establishment also opposed the advent of the telephone, which it feared would be used as a satanic instrument to encourage male-female interactions. The clerics were also opposed to television, and still oppose satellite broadcasts and the internet. “New dilemmas plaguing the clerics include illicit Bluetooth interfaces between sexes, cameras on handphones and text messaging,” Qanta notes. Technology is of course winning the battle. The most feared people in the Kingdom, Qanta reminds her readers, are the religious commissars, the Mutawwas, both for their indiscriminate use of force and for the impunity with which they operate. “Nowhere in the Kingdom is immune,” she writes, noting that individual homes and private gatherings are also raided. She believes that the Saudi national guard was created to counter the Mutawaeen threat to the monarchy itself.

Saudi society is highly class-ridden. The thousands of princes are of course a class apart; then there are the rich Saudis; and at the bottom of the ladder are the Bedouin. It was these men and women from the desert whom Qanta found to be most human and tolerant. She found the Bedouin families invariably grateful for what she did for their patients. “Bedouin families welcomed women doctors. When I cared for their sons or fathers or husbands or brothers or grandfathers, even the most orthodox families never objected. In two years, not a single Bedouin family ever asked for a male doctor to replace me. Not a single Bedouin objected to my unveiled status.”

The high point of Qanta’s stay in the Kingdom was her Hajj. She writes, “In a way, Hajj itself is a sanctuary to all conflicts between Muslims. Hajj is a symbol of how the Islamic ideal of coexistence and tolerance should be practised in wider society. Islam forbids any destruction of life at Hajj; no animals can be hunted or blood sports practised in Mecca or any of the surrounding regions either.” She points out that despite one failed attempt by clerics to place restrictions on women praying in the Haram, it remains one of the few places were male and female worshippers can intermingle. If the clergy has its way, women will be removed from public view at all holy sites, just as it has removed them from public life. As Qanta stands in front of the Ka’aba, her eyes widening with wonder, she feels overwhelmed. “A lump constricted my throat, then released, dislodged by a torrent of undimmed silent emotion. Tears were now flowing across my face, dampening the shabby veil around it. I kept gazing. I was unable to peel my eyes from my Maker. He was here. He was everywhere. He had gathered me, He had forgiven me…I could hide nothing from Him and found myself no longer fearful of discovery…In those brief private moments, I placed the burdens of my broken life aside, discharged of shame. I stepped forward lightened, free, absolved.”

She concludes her account with a tribute: “Inside the Kingdom, there was and there remains a beauty in her harshness that stays with me even now. No amount of petrodollars or panelling or polish can conceal her rugged glory. It is for this that I thank the Kingdom, for this that I thank the stranger I was once within her, and for this that I thank those of the Kingdom’s dwellers who made me, and still make me, welcome.”

(Friday Times)

When I finally managed to join the Pakistan Times – that to this day one calls PT – in 1967, it had already been under effective, though indirect, government control for eight years. The Progressive Papers Ltd (PPL) was one of the Ayub regime’s first targets. Its takeover was husbanded by Qudratullah Shahab, with military muscle provided by Lt. Gen. K.M. Sheikh and its intellectual equivalent by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The takeover was a turning point in Pakistan’s political and intellectual history, an act from which the liberal cause has never recovered.

Qudratullah Shahab has a great deal to answer for because he it was who wrote that infamous editorial – A New Leaf – that appeared the day after the putsch. Its dishonesty and intellectual depravity lay in the way it was worded. It was made to read like a confession of wrongdoing. The PPL and those who were part of it were being made to say that their inspiration lay beyond Pakistan’s borders and, in that sense, they had failed to serve the national interest. In other words, the PPL and all those who had made it one of the finest and most respected newspaper groups in Asia were being made to confess that all along, knowingly and by design, they had played the traitor, including, logically, even during 1946, the year the newspaper had been founded by Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah himself.

When the takeover came, Mazhar Ali Khan was the PT editor and it is a measure of the man that after he stepped out of his office and walked down that single flight of stairs, without looking back, he never returned as long as he lived. The PPL was taken over because it was left of the establishment of the day. Progressive in its views, which bore the stamp of its owner and founder, Mian Iftikharuddin, it advocated an independent foreign policy, subservient not to the West but to the national interest. It also called for peace with neighbours and a more forthright assertion of national self-respect. In short, the PPL group – the PT, its Urdu sister Imroze and the weekly Lail-au-Nahar – was a voice of sanity in a land which had already witnessed the first organised and crippling assault on the concept of equality before law and the relegation of religion to the realm of the private, the latter in the form of the 1953 anti-Ahmediyya riots in the Punjab.

In January 1972, Mazhar Ali Khan’s account of the takeover of the PPL was published by Pakistan Forum, that brave little journal brought out for several years under always difficult circumstances by the late Dr Feroz Ahmed. In a note appended to Mazhar Ali Khan’s memoir, the Forum wrote, “Soon after assuming the powers of the Chief Martial Law Administrator of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto fired the infamous Z.A. Suleri from the editorship of the Pakistan Times, removed Rafiq Saigol from the position of the Managing Director of the Progressive Papers, and dismissed and arrested Gen. Habibullah, Chairman of the National Press Trust. These actions, however, fell short of Bhutto’s promise of returning the Progressive Papers to its original owners and disbanding the National Press Trust.”

Mazhar Ali Khan’s account needs to be quoted at some length because not only is it the only one written of that shameful episode but as time has passed, people have also forgotten that seminal event in Pakistan’s history. The account begins, “When the people of our land attain full freedom and genuine democracy, and Pakistan’s history is written by honest scholars searching for the truth and not as a panegyric or an apologia for the Ruler of the Day, the Ayub regime will be found guilty of a long and varied list of heinous acts, of defying the most elementary principles of law and justice, of destroying institutions wedded to public weal, and of victimising individuals who could not easily be browbeaten or purchased.

“It will not be easy for our future historians to determine which single action of the self-appointed President and his government of courtiers did the greatest harm to the national interest, for they will have a wide field to survey. Many will probably conclude that the Dictatorship’s gravest crime was its deliberate destruction of press freedom, because so many other evils flowed from this act of denying to the people of Pakistan one of their fundamental rights. It is, therefore, pertinent to recall the Ayub regime’s first step towards this fascist aim, namely the attack on the Progressive Papers, an institution created under the patronage of the Quaid-i-Azam.”

Mazhar Ali Khan recalls that “the dastardly attack was made at dawn, 18 April 1959. Two Ministers, one a General, masterminded the operations with their main headquarters at the residence of the Martial Law Administrator of Zone B, and a tactical headquarters at Lahore’s Gymkhana Club.” Mazhar Ali Khan was too much of a gentleman to mention that the name of the General masterminding the operation was Lt. Gen. K. M. Sheikh, his own cousin and one of the most important ministers in the Ayub regime, and the minister was none other than Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. What a pity that Bhutto did not undo what he had helped bring about more than eleven years later when he took over the reins of power in Pakistan!

Mazhar Ali Khan continues his account, “By midnight, the offices of the Progressive Papers , the Pakistan Times, the Imroze, and the weekly Lail-o-Nahar, were surrounded by an array of armed police and CID men, and captured as the night shift left the premises. At the same time, similar detachments besieged the residences of Mian Iftikharuddin, the Company’s Chairman who also owned a majority of its shares, and its Managing Director, Syed Amir Hussain Shah. The police carried search warrants and were authorised to use ‘reasonable force’ to take possession of all documents connected with Progressive Papers Ltd., and ‘any material or documents reasonably believed to relate to receipt of funds from foreign sources, or to news, reports or information, likely to endanger the security of Pakistan.’ For some weeks before the event, we had heard rumours that the government was unhappy with the Pakistan Times because it was not giving the regime full support, and more recently sympathetic individuals connected with the government had discreetly whispered the warning that ‘something terrible’ would happen to our papers.

“We were naïve enough to believe that any action contemplated would be legal action of some sort, and we did not see how our papers came within the mischief of any existing laws, not excluding the Security Act and the various Martial Law Regulations applicable to the press. Since 8 October 1958, our journals had been published under censorship, and when the censorship order was formally withdrawn and the euphemism Press Advice substituted for it, we chose to be ‘advised’ daily, unlike some other newspapers more confident of being able to interpret the government mind in respect of the draconian laws to which the press was subject. In the circumstances, we felt that there could be no palpable cause for action, and even if action were taken out of pique it could not be sustained. Our naiveté was rudely shattered, and we learnt the lesson that a usurper’s regime guided by unprincipled and lying toadies, was capable of illegal and unscrupulous action to gain its own ends.

“The last warning received by me before the event was at 1.30 a.m., when a friend woke me up to say that he had heard from a Minister at the Gymkhana Club (the Minister being no doubt Bhutto) that he would be coming to see me (Mazhar Ali Khan) at 5 a.m. to discuss ‘the future of the Pakistan Times’. At about 5.30 a.m., the threatened Ministerial visitation – which by morning I had begun to discount – materialised. He told me in plain terms that the government had taken over the Pakistan Times. In reply to the protest that this could not be done as there was no law which allowed such action, he said that it ‘had already been done’ and that the Security Act had been amended two days ago to make it possible. Cutting short the discussion on law and ethics, he said he had come to explain that the government’s only purpose was to oust Mian Iftikharuddin and to change the management. No other change was intended, and that, in fact, ‘better facilities’ for work would be made available to the editorial staff. The confused and confusing discussion ended when I said that I would give my decision by the afternoon.

“I went immediately to see Mian Iftikharuddin, who was then seriously ill, and whose house by then was surrounded by the police, wanting to search the premises. On his behalf, Mian Mahmud Ali Kasuri tried to stall the police, but his efforts to contest the legality of the police were fruitless. At Syed Amir Hussain Shah’s residence a similar scene was being enacted. About noon, I reached the office, and saw that the takeover was indeed complete. Armed police, with handcuffs dangling from their belts, stood at the gates and CID men were all over the place. When I tried to open door to my room, I was stopped by a policeman guarding the sanctum. The Managing Director’s office was occupied by Muhammad Sarfraz, the newly appointed Administrator, and only at his intervention was I allowed to enter my room.

“Sarfraz gave me the details of the government’s monstrous action, and I saw relevant orders and notifications which had been issued, clearly showing that the coup was a well-planned conspiracy. I also saw a copy of ‘The New Leaf’, the editorial which appeared in the next day’s issues of the Pakistan Times and Imroze, Reputedly the work of Qudratullah Shahab, the then Information Secretary, it is the stupidest piece of bad writing that has ever disgraced the columns of these journals. A CID officer conducted a thorough search of my room and took away certain papers and books. The papers included Mr (Mumtaz Muhammad Khan) Daultana’s thesis on the One Unit and two letters, one for publication from Mirdula Sarabhai. The books he took away were mostly Soviet and Chinese publications. I pointed out a big pile of American publications on my table and told him that these too were of foreign origin, but he said, looking rather sheepish, that his government was not interested in them. I called an informal meeting of the other editors and senior colleagues, and told them that I had decided to resign immediately.

“Later in the afternoon, after informing Mian Iftikharuddin, I went to General (Bakhtiar) Rana’s residence4 (Martial Law Administrator). There I was confronted by a Minister and a group of senior officials, including Shahab and Sarfraz. On being told that I had decided to leave the Pakistan Times, they sought to persuade me to change my mind. A rambling debate ensued, in which the various issues were discussed. My suggestion that if the Progressive Papers were really considered guilty as charged, the charges should be proved in a court of law, only evoked inane smiles. My objection to the editorial called ‘The New Leaf’ was met with the reply that if I remained, it would be scrapped, and my objection to the Company being handed over to a government official with the offer that I should take his place. My contention that no cause of action arose as the papers had been published under censorship was used to suggest that I should carry on as no new restrictions were being imposed on the Pakistan Times.

“When it was realised that refusal was final, an official pointed out that the Essential Services Ordinance had been invoked and that I could not resign. I said it would be a novel experiment to compel an editor to continue to work against his will, and if they so desired they could try it. At this the Minister said that the Ordinance would not be applied to me, and that if I insisted my resignation would be accepted. Requesting that my name should be removed from the printline, I left the gathering. As far as the Progressive Papers Ltd. are concerned, this is almost the end of the story, bar the shouting. The next day, Syed Amir Hussain Shah and Mian Mahmud Ali Kasuri met the two Ministers (Gen. Sheikh and Bhutto, that is. KH) at their main headquarters and protested against the action taken by the government, demanding that the charges should either be substantiated in a court of law or withdrawn. The General’s only reply was that Mian Mahmud Ali Kasuri could well have been arrested for obstructing police officers in the discharge of their duty. The other Minister tried to justify government’s action, but the only concrete instance of ‘subversion’ he mentioned was a brief editorial note published in the Pakistan Times regarding the Sino-India border dispute in which it had been suggested that India’s attitude was unreasonable.

“A few days later, Mian Iftikharuddin, his son Arif, and Syed Amir Hussain Shah were served notices stating that in the government’s opinion they had purchased shares in Progressive Papers Ltd. with the help of foreign funds, and that their shares would be confiscated under the Security Act, which, incidentally, was repeatedly amended to cater for each shift in the situation. Mian Iftikharuddin demanded that he should have access to the papers and cheque books taken away by the CID so that he could show how he had paid for the Progressive Papers shares. This permission was not granted. When Syed Amir Hussain Shah appeared before the Tribunal to explain his purchase of shares in 1946, he told the body that Mian Iftikharuddin should be given the opportunity to present his explanation. No notice was taken of this plea. While Amir Hussain’s shares were restored to him, Mian Iftikharuddin and his son were dispossessed of all their shares. It is obvious that the government had no intention of listening to reason and the Tribunal was enacting a farce, because long before it had met, notices for the auction of these shares had been advertised.

“The directors also received letters stating that the Board had been dissolved because the Progressive Papers Ltd. were receiving ‘policy guidance and financial assistance’ from foreign sources; that ‘there was an objectionable innuendo in their writings which, even if it was not discernible in any single article, was, in the accumulative influence on the minds of its readers, meant to engender subversion’. Replied in refutation of these and other charges were submitted, but the Tribunal set up under the Security Act took no notice of these explanations; the demand that the Directors concerned should be heard by the Tribunal was ignored; and even their telegrams and registered letters were not acknowledged.

Mian Mahmud Ali Kasuri then sent to the government a ‘notice of demand for justice’ in which he pointed out the various illegalities and improprieties committed by the government and demanded that these grievances should be redressed, failing which he would be compelled to resort to a court of law. No reply was received, a Writ Petition was filed before the Supreme Court, but before it could be heard, the government passed a Martial Law Regulation removing the matter from the Court’s purview.

“During this period, the real story behind the takeover began to unfold. It was learnt that soon after the Ayub regime had established itself, it felt the need of the services of newspapers that would be completely subservient to its interests. Proposals were initially made to start one or two newspapers under the government’s direct control. When the matter was examined in detail, it was realised that the venture was not likely to succeed. A proposal for nationalising the whole press was also considered but was rejected because of the fear of adverse publicity abroad. It was then decided that some well-established newspapers should somehow be acquired. The Progressive Papers were a good target, because in addition to the Pakistan Times, the country’s largest English language daily, there was also an Urdu daily and a weekly.

“A cabinet committee had been set up to deal with the matter. Once the decision had been taken to take over the Progressive Papers, the case against them began to be built up. The so-called political charges were reported to have been prepared by the Director of the Intelligence Bureau (Mian Anwar Ali?), assisted by a Brigadier who at the time was grooming himself to become the Goebbles of the regime (Brig. F.R. Khan. KH). Other government departments were instructed to dig up anything they could find against the Company and its newspapers. This process reportedly went on for many months. That the charges were utterly false is proved to be a fact that although the Company’s files were scrutinised by teams of sleuths for nearly three years, not a single iota of evidence was discovered to substantiate any charge of even to pinpoint a serious irregularity.

“One by one, the inquiries instituted in respect of the charges were dropped, and the criminal case filed against Mian Iftikharuddin in respect of newsprint import and sale was withdrawn; thereafter the government had to find other means of harassing him and persecutions continued until his demise. Since it is plain that the charges against Progressive Papers Ltd. were fabricated, and would have been thrown out of court even by a third class magistrate gifted with a modicum of honesty and elementary knowledge of legal procedures, the Ayub government’s action and the kangaroo court which authenticated it can only be viewed as a medieval auto da fe because the only complaint which had validity was that those who owned, managed and guided the Pakistan Times and its sister papers did not share the regime’s faith in its dictatorship, and for this lack of faith, they were punished.”

This is the end of Mazhar Ali Khan’s account and we all are in his debt for having written it so that in times to come, people should know how the Ayub regime set about crushing the independent press in Pakistan. Mazhar Ali Khan was too great and principled a man to be tempted by the regime’s offers. He was also not the only one who resigned. Ahmed Nadim Qasmi, who was editing Imroze, also resigned, as did Syed Sibte Hasan, editor of the weekly Lail-au-Nahar. Akmal Aleemi, who was on the reporting staff of Imroze told me that most senior members of the staff of both Urdu publications also wanted to resign but were advised by Qasmi and Sibte Hasan not to do so. They were told to stay in there and watch the unfolding of events. Perhaps things might change and the regime may realise its folly. They were to be proved wrong, because the Ayub regime had no qualms about trampling over press freedom and civil liberties. The self-made Field Marshal was to rule Pakistan for more than a decade until he was toppled over by his army chief. Those who live by the sword die by the sword had once again proved to be one of those aphorisms which are true.

The start of Pakistan’s misfortunes and downhill slide dates from 1953 because had there been no 1953 when parts of Pakistan had their first taste of martial law, there would have been no 1958; and had there been no 1958, there would have been no 1974 which saw with the declaration of the Ahmedis as non-Muslims. With this, the essentially secular character of the state founded by the Quaid-i-Azam changed for all time. The PPL group had to be neutralised and brought under direct government control because it stood for the liberal values its founder – revered, but only in name by his successors – had lived by all his life. And had there been no 1974, there would have been no 1977. And so on and so forth. What a sad history this country, established in the name of freedom and the people’s inalienable and fundamental rights, has had!

Abdulla Malik records in his autobiography Purani Mehfilain Yaad Aa Rahin Hain, published in Lahore in 2001, that since there was not a single newspaper in the Punjab that could represent the viewpoint of the All India Muslim League, in May 1946 a group of Muslim League supporters got together to set up the Progressive Papers Ltd. (PPL) as a private company. The seven directors of the new company were: Nawab Iftikhar Hussain Khan Mamdot, Mian Mumtaz Muhammad Khan Daultana, Sardar Shaukat Hyat Khan, Rafi Butt, S.A. Latif, Syed Amir Hussain Shah and Mian Iftikharuddin. In October that year, Mian Iftikharuddin, being the largest shareholder, was appointed managing director by consensus. When after the Muslim League’s launch of a civil disobedience movement in the Punjab, its leaders were arrested on 28 and 29 January 1947 from the party’s central office, PPL began to print a special daily supplement called the Pakistan Times. The reception it received on a popular level was enthusiastic and immediate. The new publication played an undeniable role in energising League party workers, students and women. The newspaper began regular publication on 4 February 1947 with eight pages. The Quaid-i-Azam’s name appeared under the masthead as founder, while the printline bore the names of Mian Iftikharuddin as publisher and printer and Faiz Ahmed Faiz as acting editor.

The publication of the Pakistan Times was a breakthrough for the Muslims of the Punjab and for the party which was spearheading the fight for Pakistan. There were some who wondered why Faiz, who had no experience of journalism, had been made editor. Such critics, in the end, satisfied themselves with the explanation that the Communist Party had been making inroads into the Muslim League since 1942 and since Faiz was progressive in his political views, it was not surprising that he had been picked up. Mian Iftikharuddin was seen by many as a fellow traveller of the Communists. In fact, he had left Congress because of his consistent support for the Communists. Some said that Faiz’s name must have been proposed by Sahibzada Mahmood-uz-Zafar, the principal of M.A.O. College, Amrtisar (where Faiz had once taught and been befriended by Zafar and his wife Dr Rashid Jahan), a famous Communist. However, the fact was that Faiz had been appointed on the basis of merit.

According to Abdulla Malik, Faiz was still in the Indian Army and living in Connaught Palace Hotel, New Delhi, when he heard about the planned publication of a newspaper in English from Lahore. He sent an application to Mian Iftikharuddin and as an example of his writing, he sent with it an editorial captioned ‘The future of the ICS’. Two others, whose names were mentioned at the time as possible editors, were Col. Majeed Malik and Agha Abdul Hamid, ICS. Col. Majeed Malik had been editor of Muslim Outlook, the first English language newspaper to come out of Lahore. This newspaper was owned by Maulvi Abdul Haq and its printer and publisher was a gentleman by the name of Syed Dilawar Ali Shah. They were both followers of the Jamaat-e-Ahmediyya. Syed Dilawar Ali Shah had served a one-year term in jail because of his role in the unrest caused among Punjab’s Muslims by the publication of Rangeela Rasul, an abusive book about the Prophet of Islam. Some said that Col. Majeed Malik’s father was also an Ahmedi which was why he had been made editor of Muslim Outlook. It should also be recorded that it was Col. Majeed Malik, who had joined army public relations during the war, to whom Faiz owed his entry into the same department as captain. He rose to the rank of colonel.

Brig. Desmond Young was engaged by Mian Iftikharuddin as Adviser to PPL. He lived in Falettis Hotel where he set things in motion with the help of a British woman secretary he had brought along. He also recruited some of the first staff members of the new newspaper. During the war, he had edited the army newspaper Forces Time. He had also backed Faiz’s appointment as editor. The Pakistan Times began publication from the Civil and Military Gazette Press Building on the Mall. This British-owned newspaper was now the property of the industrialist Seth Dalmia. It was later purchased by the Sikh leader, Sardar Baldev Singh.

According to Abdulla Malik, the Pakistan Times played a major role in inspiring Punjab’s middle class Muslims, especially women, to take part in the civil disobedience movement launched by the Muslim League. The Defence League for Women, a Communist Party front, was also active behind the scenes in fanning the movement. The manner in which Muslim women from Punjab’s conservative and land-owning families took part in marches and other street protests was as remarkable as it was unprecedented. The Pakistan Times subsisted on advertising from small-time Muslim traders. And although Mian Iftikharuddin after much effort had been able to get an enlarged newsprint quota from the government so that he could increase the number of the newspaper’s pages from eight to twelve, this extra newsprint was never actually given. The Pakistan Times, therefore, continued to come out with the eight pages it had started with.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz eventually became chief editor with Mazhar Ali Khan as his editor. It was Mazhar Ali Khan who put the newspaper together and led the editorial team. Mian Iftikharuddin did not interfere. The story is told of Mian Sahib, as he was always called by everyone, from editor to office messenger, asking Mazhar if a speech he had made a day earlier at a public meeting somewhere in the city was to be carried. No, it wasn’t. More printable news had taken the space where that story might have appeared. It is a measure of the man called Mian Iftikharuddin that he found the answer perfectly acceptable. Sometimes Mian Sahib would joke about his “treatment” by his own newspapers. He would say to Mazhar, “O Mazhar, yaar kaday meri party di khabar vi chhaap dya kar.” (O Mazhar, my friend, do sometimes find space for news of my party.)

Such intellectual generosity and modesty of spirit is unimaginable in the Pakistan of today. Now we live in the age of the proprietor editor. Some of them want page one treatment and it never occurs to them that such conduct is in extreme bad taste. Not for them the old adage that the only time an editor should make his own newspaper as news is a day after he dies.

Chacha F.E. Chaudhary, the doyen of press photographers in Pakistan, told me of an exchange he had with Mian Iftikharuddin. There was a meeting of Azad Pakistan Party taking place in Gujranwala – Mian Sahib as the party’s founder and moving spirit being the featured speaker – to which he wanted F.E. to go. Chacha said he could not do that because he had “more important” things to cover “right here in Lahore”. And that was that.

Once Chacha, who on rare occasions could show flashes of temper, felt upset over something Mian Iftikharuddin had said to him. “O Mian ja, mein teri naukri nahin karni.” (O Mian, here it is: I do not want to work for you any longer.) And he walked out. But it was not the end of the story. A day later, the man who had founded and who owned the PPL empire apologised to Chacha, urging him to come back. “Ley phair Chaudhri mein vi dekhna waan toon keenvain chudd ke jaana wain.” (All right, Chaudhry, so we shall see if you do actually succeed in leaving me.) Chacha came back and never left. In the end, it was the emaciated PPL of the Zia-ul-Haq days that told Chacha he was retired. Chacha became the president of the PPL retirees union and it is to his credit and that of Benazir Bhutto, who was then Prime Minister, that it became possible for the widows of those who had once served the PPL to get pensions and gratuities. That is Bibi’s one good and memorable deed and it will surely get her into heaven, if not to the Prime Minister’s house for the third time. However, to this day Chacha is not satisfied that all the money that is owed to him has been paid. Once in 1997, I spent much time banging my head against various ministries in Islamabad, chasing old PPL files but, as was to be expected, nothing came of it. Sorry Chacha, I tried.

Mian Iftikharuddin used to host a grand dinner at his residence every year for everyone who worked at the PPL, from editors to chowkidars to press workers. This event, more than anything, symbolised the spirit of comradeship that remained characteristic of the PPL before the Ayub takeover. Mian Iftikharuddin had also bought a property in Kuldana, Murree Hills, where members of the PPL staff could take summer holidays. It is impossible to imagine that the multimillionaire newspaper owners of today would even think of making such a gesture. To Mian Iftikharuddin, the most important achievement of his life was the establishment of the Progressive Papers Ltd. In the end, he died of a broken heart. Had the PPL been allowed to live, so would have Mian Iftikharuddin, one of Pakistan’s greatest sons and a man who, as the Americans say, put his money where his mouth was. I always think of him as among the last of the believers.

Akmal Aleemi who joined Imroze as a reporter in 1956, recalled for me in Washington that in the early days, the reporters’ morning meeting used to be taken for both PT and Imroze by Mazhar Ali Khan. Syed Iftikhar Shah was the PT chief reporter and Abdulla Malik his Imroze counterpart.

Syed Amjad Hussain, who was chief reporter when I joined PT was, of course, there, as was the inimitable Nawab Safiruddin, a genuine Nawab from the Loharo family. Nawab sahib was the most laid-back reporter this or that side of the Suez Canal. Akmal remembers one meeting, held a day after a horrific fire destroyed the city’s bamboo bazar that lay next door to PPL offices. The fire that took hours to kill and, at one point, threatened to spread in every other direction, was the big story in next day’s newspapers, except PT. As at other morning meetings, Mazhar Ali Khan had the city papers laid out in front of him. Nawab Safiruddin’s story was a two-liner affair that just said that a fire had broken out in such and such bazar, had gutted everything and was eventually brought under control. “Nawab Sahib, look at the other newspapers, look at the details, look at the pictures. Then look at your own newspaper. All we have is these two lines (which he read out).” Nawab Safiruddin, cool as always, replied, “Fires? Fires are an everyday occurrence. This one was somewhat bigger, but it was just another fire.” All Mazhar Ali Khan could say was, “Nawab Sahib, even a fire this big cannot move you!”

Imroze was edited by Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi. The first editor, the legendary Maulana Charagh Hasan Hasrat, had died. He it was who made two classic observations about reporters, the first being, “Maulana (he called everyone Maulana), I wish someone would take away this devilish invention, the telephone, from these reporters, because these fellows no longer go anywhere. They get their stories sitting right in their chairs by phone from others of their ilk.” The other observation was, “Maulana, do not take what you write and what we print too seriously. All you have to do in the evening is to go to Gwalmandi and you will find that they are wrapping fish in that great piece of writing you caused to get into print in the morning.”

The Maulana was succeeded by Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi who was assisted on the writing side by Hameed Hashmi, who died in the 1964 PIA crash at Cairo along with so many other Pakistani journalists, including Zaheer Babar and Hameed Akhtar. Ahmed Bashir also worked for Imroze but I am not sure what years he was there and for how long. The head calligraphist at Imroze was the great stylist Hafiz Yusuf Sadeedi who, along with Muhammad Siddiq Almas Raqam (who calligraphed all of Allama Mohammad Iqbal’s books) and Nafees Raqam is one of the three all-time calligraphy greats of Pakistan. The brilliant Imroze logo and masthead were designed by Hafiz Yusuf Sadeedi who died young in a car accident in Saudi Arabia. Akmal Aleemi recalls that when the Chinese leaders paid an official visit to Pakistan, Sadeedi wrote the headlines in a style that looked Chinese from a distance but, on closer examination, turned out to be Urdu. At the height of its popularity, Imroze was selling 100,000 copies, which by the standard of those days was a formidable circulation figure.

Some of the most distinguished names in Urdu journalism were associated with Imroze at different times in its 40-year history, including those of Hamid Jhelumi, Haroon Saad, Munno Bhai, Haider Ali, Aslam Kashmiri, Syed Fazeel Hashmi, Azim Qureshi, Akbar Alam, Abdul Qadir Hassan, Masood Ashar, Syed Mahmood Jafrrey, Shafqat Tanveer Mirza and Zafeeri Nadvi. Imroze was snuffed out of existence in November 1991. PT went the same way. They were “privatised” and though they did find buyers, those buyers had no intention of continuing their publication. Had the government really been interested in the continued existence of these two great institutions, it would have attached a condition to the sale that the buyer would have to guarantee continued publication. No such condition was imposed because their privatisation was privatisation in name only. Actually, it was a sentence of death.

Imroze modernised Urdu journalism. It was the best produced, the best laid-out, but more than anything, the best-written newspaper in the business. No newspaper that followed it was able to match its excellence or style. Imroze scored many firsts, among them the production of special sections. Its literary edition is remembered to this day. Nothing but the best contemporary writing could get into it and it was considered something of an honour to have one of your works appear in Imroze. If you were an unknown and your work was accepted for publication in the literary section of the newspaper, you could be said to have arrived. Khwaja Nazir Ahmed, an Islamia College teacher, once brought a ‘na’at’ for publication to Maulana Charagh Hasan Hasrat, who took the poem in praise of the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him), offered him a cup of tea and sent him on his way. Some days later, a very upset Khwaja Nazir Ahmed marched into Maulana’s room and wanted to know what his ‘na’at’ was doing pinned high on the wall outside the editor’s door. “Maulana,” said Charagh Hasan Hasrat, “Chhup jati to puranay akbaaroon ki raddi mein bikti aur bai-hurmati hoti. Yahah tank di, ke har aata jaat parhay.” (Had it got into print, it would have been later sold as waste paper, which would have been disrespectful to its distinguished subject. I have pinned it high on the wall, so that all who pass to and fro may read it.)

When I joined PT, it was after much effort and with a great deal of difficulty, because in those days it was almost impossible to get into a newspaper like PT. Although it was now a publication of the National Press Trust, in many ways it was still the newspaper Mian Iftikharuddin had founded. Those still working there in 1967 form an all-time Who’s Who of Pakistan’s English or Urdu language journalism. The editor was the impeccable Khwaja M. Asaf who had started life as a sports sub, as had the redoubtable H.K. Burki. We had an edition in Rawalpindi whose first editor was Ahmed Azeez Zia (still going great guns in Lahore at The Nation). Maulvi Muhammad Saeed who had come from Dawn and was acknowledged countrywide as the best newspaper makeup and layout man edited the Rawalpindi edition. He was a gentleman of great kindness and I always felt the most effortless respect for him. A.B.S. Jafri (all Jafri brothers are called A.B.S. and I have always wondered how they tell one from the other) was the newspaper’s parliamentary correspondent who wrote his popular and delightful ‘In the Gallery” column under the penname ‘Nafis’.

The PT bureau of reporters in Rawalpindi had some of the best in the business. As the government began to shift to Islamabad, so did the better part of the bureau, headed by H.K. Burki who was the paper’s diplomatic correspondent – and there hasn’t been a more knowledgeable or authoritative one. The Islamabad bureau which had made a virtual unilateral declaration of independence, as it were, was made up of Salamat Ali and Aslam Sheikh. Syed Shabbir Hussain Shah, Muhammad Ikram and Mahmood Ahmed had stayed back in Rawalpindi. Syed Shabbir Hussain who wrote a book on Allama Mashriqi whose follower and admirer, like his brother Sarwar Shah, a senior shift incharge on the PT desk in Lahore, he remains to this day. There was much bad blood between the with-it progressive group led by Burki and those who sided with Shabbir Shah. By the time, Bhutto was out of the Ayub Khan government in 1966, the line was clearly drawn between those who were Bhutto’s fans and those who detested him. Very few have changed their loyalties as the years have passed. As I write this at the start of the year 2002, it occurs to me that Bhutto has been dead for nearly twenty-three years. Those who hated him then, hate him today. And those who liked him then, like him today. Not many people have the gift of triggering such contrary emotions. To people like Shabbir Shah, for example, anything was to be preferred to Bhutto, even military rule.

The PT desk in Rawalpindi had its stars, none brighter than Salim Asmi who was to have the distinction of succeeding Ahmed Ali Khan as editor of Dawn. Ahmed Ali Khan, of course, started with PT and left after the Ayub takeover. The upright, principled journalism that is synonymous with his name is inseparable from the institution where he made his name. You could not pull rank with Ahmed Ali Khan as you could not pull rank with Mazhar Ali Khan or Faiz Ahmed Faiz. These men belonged to a noble tradition and they brought honour to the profession. They were neither amenable to pressure, nor impressed by power, nor interested in money or what money can buy. Not for them plots of land and other perks which really were, and are, no more and no less than bribes.

I joined PT after some years in the wilderness of the civil service where I found myself initially as an income tax officer whose Vespa scooter was stolen at least three times from outside Shezan or Lord’s, the two Lahore restaurants on the Mall, both now gone, where much of our time was spent. In the second phase, I was in Altaf Gauhar’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. In fact, I owed my rescue from income tax to him. He also appointed me secretary of Broadcasting Committee, the only one to be established in Pakistan’s entire history. Once its report was done and submitted – and laid aside, never to be retrieved - I quietly resigned without telling my family because I wanted to be a journalist and nothing but a journalist. Hamid Jalal who always wanted to set up a national features syndicate had finally been able to find some money for it and he made me Lahore editor of the short-lived Pakistan Features Syndicate. The job lasted about three months because the Syndicate’s money ran out and the government that had provided the initial funding was not prepared to put in any more. The Syndicate was in a way a part of APP and, for some time, I hung around its office on the Mall which was then headed by the gentle and soft-spoken Ahmed Bashir.

After the Syndicate folded and with it the small office I had set up in the Gardi Trust Building of McLeod Road, I had to look for a job. A lot of fingers were wagged at me. “Look at that fool. He kicks a Class I central government post and becomes a journalist and, as was to be expected, is now out of work,” was typical of the comment I was subjected to. However, I was not out of work for long. With some help from I.A. Rehman who was one of the PT assistant editors, I was hired as a senior reporter on the newspaper. I have never felt more satisfied or happier, even when I was asked by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to become his first Press Secretary. I had already begun to write a weekly column for the PT that was called ‘Of this and that’. It ran for years. I recall that it was in one of them that I quoted Sardar Muhammad Sadiq as saying that if the CSP association tried to stage a protest march in Lahore, the police could have the day off as the lathi charge would be carried out by the ‘awam’.

When I look back, the years that I spent at PT were the most exciting and the happiest of my life. There was little money in it but one managed to live quite well, nevertheless. I do believe in what is called barkat or a little money going far. Also, I suppose, thirty years or so ago, life was not as expensive as it is today. One managed to do with very little and consumerism had not yet hit Pakistan. I was paid Rs 100 a column and when to that was added Rs 700 or so, that being the salary of a senior reporter, it was loot big enough to enable me to run around Lahore and spend the occasional evening in that long, cool, half-dark bar of the Park Luxury Hotel over a glass of ice-cold beer with roasted peanuts on the side. I can never forget the enchantment of sharing a drink with the inimitable Abdullah Butt and listening to him hold forth on every subject under the sun. A better conversationalist I have never met. Once in a while, the poet Zaheer Kaashmiri would drop in. One evening, he explained to me what constituted the soul of the raga Peelo. The famous bols of the Peelo thumri, Morey sayyan ji utrain gai paar ho, nadia dheeray baho, were incomplete unless you added the word na after baho. And he was absolutely right. It transmuted those haunting bols into something I can feel but not explain.

When I think of those who worked at PT, I cannot help feeling a tinge of pride that I was privileged by fate and circumstance - and a bit of my own determination - to work with these men under the same roof. Khwaja Asaf was our editor and what a perfect gentleman he was. A better editor there wasn’t and to think that there was to come a time when he was to try to edit (he could only have tried) badly written copy at The Muslim. In the end, I am told, he gave up because although the language in which one particular young and delightfully enterprising reporter wrote his stories had a distinct resemblance to English, the former editor of Pakistan Times was never quite sure what kind of English it was, or if it was English at all or something else.

At PT, Khwaja Asaf’s famous red ballpoint was the sword that swiftly came down on any lapse involving language, usage or grammar. His morning meeting was with the assistant editors. The reporters’ meeting was taken by our chief reporter Syed Amjad Hussain who had succeeded Iftikhar Shah. The reporters’ room which faced that of the News Editor – who at the time was Ahmed Azeez Zia – was never to be found empty. The PT Lahore team when I joined was made up of Maqbul Sheriff, the finest legal reporter of those or other days (which was why he was called ‘Judge Sahib’), I.H. Rashed (though he was just as observing a Muslim then as he is today with his long, flowing and impressively white beard), Ali Asghar whom we called ‘Comrade Ali Asgharov’ (though he spoke German not Russian), Abdul Majid who did the city and crime and myself, the newest entrant who was assigned education, culture and the occasional Nur Jehan and Musarrat Nazir story. Once when a succession of these stories – Nur Jehan’s divorce blues and Musarrat Nazir’s tax troubles – appeared in the normally staid columns of PT, Sardar Muhammad Sadiq, whom Muslehuddin once called ‘the uncrowned king of Lahore’, phoned Khwaja Asaf and when the call was put through by the PPL operator, Sardar Sadiq asked, “Khwaja Sahib, are you still there?” “What do you mean? Where should I be?” Khwaja Asaf replied. “I mean the kind of stories that are now appearing in the Pakistan Times had led me to believe that Irshad Hussain Kazmi had taken over as editor,” Sardar Sadiq said. He also asked him when he was likely to get out of the “also spoke” category.

However, your given beat notwithstanding, if you had an exclusive story involving an area that was part of someone else’s beat, you could file it without being considered a poacher. On my part, I always first asked the colleague concerned if it was all right by him. Bylines had to be earned. Only an important and exclusive story was accorded a byline: all others were ‘By a staff reporter’. Another reporter, Sharaq Mahmood, came to PT in between, but after some time left to join my old department of income-tax. The last time I met him, he was doing very well there. When I asked him if he would rather have been a journalist, he did not think his decision not to stay as one had been unwise. I suppose, to each his own. Another young fellow, Tauheed Ahmed, stayed for a while, then left to join Pakistan’s foreign service, where on one occasion, he repaid me the compliment of once having been my colleague at PT by recording in a file that I was a “security risk”. No wonder he became an ambassador! My five years in the foreign service that still lay in the future, did not succeed in making me an Excellency, but that is another story.

Seldom has a finer bunch of journalists been assembled under one roof than the PT assistant editors of my time. Consider their names. First among equals, but one without an equal, was the late A.T. Chaudhri who was to become the founding editor of The Muslim during the dark and difficult days of Zia-ul-Haq. Then there were I. A. Rehman, Tahir Mirza, the late Aziz Siddiqi and the scintillating Muhammad Idrees whose ‘Tea House Column’ had a flavour all its own. Kamal Haider was in charge of special projects and Jamil Ahmed (who, when in his cups used to stand up and dance while singing Na toray ray sarkari neembua) was magazine editor. Ali Akhtar Mirza was chief district correspondent. He was a man known for his gentleness and good manners. He had gone into Kashmir with the irregulars in 1947, the only reporter to have observed those events at first hand. Then there was that grand man Hamid Sheikh whose column, which was often about old Lahore and its ways and customs, its food, its festivals, its unique characters, was one of a kind. He always signed his column with his initials H.S. In the wings were Lala Hafiz Javed and Zafar Iqbal Mirza ‘Zim’.

Khaled Ahmed and Nasim Ahmed came after I had left but I have no doubt that the fine journalist that Khaled Ahmed is today is in no small measure to be credited to his days at PT. Lala Hafiz Javed worked for the BBC during the Second War, having started with the All India Radio in the early days. I have never heard a richer and more resonant voice than his. Lala with a few drinks inside him was impossible. Once in the middle of the night, he decided to wake up the editor and tell him what he thought of men and matters. With his inseparable leather bag (which carried the stuff) in hand, he appeared outside Khwaja Asaf’s Samnabad home and began a rambling harangue which woke up the very proper Khwaja Asaf who, being a man of few words, said, “Lala, go home, we will talk about it tomorrow.”

Next day, Lala had forgotten where he had been the night before.

Both Lala and Zim did letters when Tahir Mirza who actually was the letters editor was away or doing something else. The PT “culture minister” was Safdar Mir who wrote his authoritative weekly column ‘Cultural Notes’ and woe to him who dare cross him. Once I wrote a column in PT, of all papers, about a critic called Eno (of the famous fruit salt) and after it was published, I was advised to stay away from the office because Mir Sahib was said to be looking for me. I knew like everyone else that in his day he used to be called the “boxer of the Progressive Writers’ Movement”. Anwar Ali who created the immortal ‘Nanna’ was the PT art editor and cartoonist and one never found him without a smile on his face. He also wrote wonderful stories in Punjabi. The children and women’s page was done by ‘Apa Jan’ who was Mariam Habib. Before her marriage, she was Mariam Shah and the number of her admirers in the city was legion. My friend Zamurrad first told me about her while I was still at Murray College, Sialkot. He said she could be called “mom ki Maryam” or Waxen Madonna. It was around 1968 that Talat, a young woman, was recruited as PT’s lady reporter. We all called her Talli. She stayed at the paper for very many years. No longer alive, she is missed by her friends for her warmth and artlessness.

The PT newsdesk was formidable. One thinks of the great Jeff Player with his wig and impeccable sense of humour, Ali Arif, Waheed-ul-Zafar, Ghulam Muhammad Naqqash, Sarwar Shah, Khwaja M. Saeed, Hafiz Abdul Haye Khayal, Riaz Malik, Sarfraz Durrani and so many other brilliant and devoted men who made PT the great newspaper it was. It may be long dead but it is not forgotten.

The PT reference section was run by Nizamuddin who had been with the newspaper since the beginning. There being no computers in those days, newspapers, magazines and printed material was clipped and pasted in outsize registers which could be consulted when required. There was a cross-reference system and Nizamuddin knew exactly where one could find what one was looking for. Material was posted not only themewise – say disarmament or nuclear energy – but under individual names as well. There was always a musty smell in the room where the Reference Section was housed, but it never happened that a reference or quote you were looking for was not available. Nizamuddin was very proud of his Section as he well should have been. When PT finally folded, he joined Mazhar Ali Khan’s news weekly Viewpoint. And when that closed down too (or maybe he left earlier after some misunderstanding with the management), he went to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan where a number of old PT men worked. The Commission was headed – and still is - by none other than I.A. Rehman with Aziz Siddiqui as his deputy. Nizamuddin came from Sargodha and always wore home-spun cotton, being a lifelong trade unionist and member or fellow traveller of the Communist Party.

The prince of sports reporters at PT was the handsome Farooq Mazhar who died so tragically and suddenly in 2001. He had covered every Olympiad since Tokyo in 1964 and it was PT that paid for his travels on sports assignments around the world. Asaf Khan who never quite got used to Farooq’s new fangled and, what to him, were irresponsible, ways, never wrote a sports report without mentioning his beloved Jullandhar somewhere in it. The monthly Sportimes which was from the PPL stable was ruled by Sultan F. Hussain with Mahmood Butt as the resident artist. Butt was a champion boxer who was always prepared to knock anyone’s teeth in if asked to do so by a friend who felt that he had been wronged and a score needed to be settled.

This story will remain incomplete if no mention is made of Z.A. Zuleri who kept haunting PT like a troublesome ghost who won’t go away. Suleri’s fortunes always flourished under military or dictatorial rule. He first alighted on the newspaper as Chief Editor in 1962, brought in by Chaudhri Zahoor Elahi who had bought the majority of the shares. Suleri had himself appointed chief editor both of PT and Imroze. He stayed in that position – though he was forced to shed the Imroze editorship later – for several years and turned the newspapers into spineless propaganda mouthpieces of the Ayub dictatorship. Suleri was never acceptable to the workers and journalists of the two newspapers. However, there was little they could do about him. He was part of the martial law apparatus. He left once, only to come back later, and then again. When Bhutto took over the shattered, dismembered Pakistan, he sacked Suleri on national radio on 20 December 1971 in his first speech. I remember that heady evening at PPL. We were dancing with joy and Muhammad Idrees and I stayed around until the early hours of the morning. I also remember Idrees saying that he knew of a place where we could get a great cup of tea. “We have no champagne, but we have to celebrate, so I think tea would do nicely for the time being,” he said.

Suleri had this great talent for coming back when everybody thought he was gone for good. His gift lay not so much in his ability to write, as to convince the government of the day that it could not find a better drumbeater for its policies, right or wrong. Bhutto detested Suleri but in the end he brought him back. He had forgotten that it was the same Suleri who had written a front page editorial in December 1970 on election day captioned ‘Vote for Islam’ or perhaps it was ‘Vote for Pakistan’. A vote for Bhutto, in Suleri’s contorted argument, was a vote against both Islam and Pakistan. However, Suleri is dead and one should perhaps let the dead rest in peace, though it must be said that in his contribution to the rise of fascism and obscurantism in Pakistan, Z. A. Suleri occupies a place no one can possibly describe as honourable.

The only time those who worked at the PPL staged a revolt was in early 1971. Labouring under the romantic illusion that in the wake of the popular upsurge that had caused Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his Pakistan People’s Party to score a runaway victory in Punjab and Sindh in the 1970 elections, they could finally do away with the illegal takeover of their newspapers, the PPL Workers Union, under the leadership of the firebrand Safdar Mir, organised a dharna or sit-in in front of the PPL offices in Lahore. A large tent was pitched right across the street from the entrance and members of the Union, both journalists and press and office workers, sat down on the ground with garlands around their necks on a “hunger strike until victory”. They were joined by the irrepressible and stage-conscious Mukhtar Rana from Faisalabad who had been elected to the National Assembly on a PPP ticket. Ahmed Raza Kasuri, who, some years later, was to be instrumental in his leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s execution by Zia-ul-Haq and his compliant superior judiciary, was also among the hunger strikers. Then there was Skipper Abdul Hafiz Kardar, who had been returned to the Punjab Assembly on a PPP ticket from Lahore city. It was exciting stuff and there was a wonderful feeling in the air, a feeling that we were free at last. All day long, people from all over Lahore and even neighbouring towns would come to express solidarity with the hunger-strikers. They included trade unionists, other journalists, PPP supporters and those who had had enough of the established order.

Everyone believed that the PPP was one hundred percent behind the strikers. They were wrong. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was angered by, what he considered, an unhelpful and precipitate act. He was at the time trying to come to some power-transfer arrangement with Gen. Yahya Khan and he felt that this sort of action that could only embolden others across the country to stage similar shows of people’s power. He feared that if he accorded his blessings to the PPL takeover by its workers, it would not help either him or his party. He arrived in Lahore a few days after the strike and denounced it in no uncertain terms. He said those who had led the strike were “Sir Galaheads”. He sent word that he wanted the whole thing called off immediately. He also assured the Yahya regime that if it wanted to move against the strikers who were rocking the boat, the action would have his support.

That was the signal the regime was awaiting. The Deputy Commissioner of Lahore, the affable Masood Mufti, under orders from the federal government, moved in one night with a posse of armed police, unpegged the tents, threw all the hunger strikers in police vans and removed them to an isolated spot in the middle of Iqbal Parks. The strike petered out a day or two later. Bhutto never forgave the strikers and none of them did well thereafter in terms of his political career. Kardar, who might have become Chief Minister or Governor of Punjab, was ignored after Bhutto came to power and though he was taken in the Punjab cabinet after some months, he could never earn Bhutto’s trust. Bhutto had no time for or patience with those who would try to upstage him. In Karachi, he never forgave Mairaj Muhammad Khan because he suspected him to be behind the strike by workers in the S.I.T.E. area, a strike that was ruthlessly suppressed by the tyrannical Mumtaz Ali Bhutto. Mukhtar Rana was eventually unseated.

However, to this day, I savour the taste of that moment when PPL workers sat like brothers on the road, under a tent, across their work place and felt that they were at last within reach of undoing the injustice that had been done to them and their great institution a decade earlier by a military dictator.

But this account should close with our dear Chacha, the great Chacha F.E. Chaudhary, to whom everyone owed money. And that includes me, to this day. Chacha lives in Lahore, all by himself, and is 92 years old in the year of the Lord 2002. May he complete his well-played and well-earned hundred and then get himself some more runs. He may be in his nineties but he is not in the least nervous, unlike some batsmen I know. He is one man who keeps in touch with all old PPL hands. He can tell you how is where and how. It was through Chacha that word came the other day – February 2002 – that Ali Akhtar Mirza had died in Lahore. It was also Chacha who wrote to me some years ago of the passing away in Islamabad of Kamal Haider. Chacha remains the old PPL’s lost and found office.

The abandoned PPL building till stands in Rattan Chand Road, Lahore, haunted by the days that were. And perhaps by the ghost of Z.A. Suleri, looking for another stint as chief editor.

Back in the days when Suharto ruled Indonesia, I asked a Jakarta journalist with whom I worked how often their president had gone abroad on state visits since 1966 when he took power. “Not many times,” he answered.

“Let me explain,” he said when he noticed the somewhat bewildered look on my face. “It is like this. When he wants business done abroad, he sends a minister or if an official will do, an official. He says his place of duty is his own country, which is where he may be able to do some good.”

I asked him about the number of foreign heads of state and government invited to visit Indonesia. “Not many,” he replied, “because these things are one-on-one. What is more, our business gets done regardless. We don’t miss not having them.” He told me that Suharto had once gone to a Non-Aligned summit in an African country but returned home two days later. When asked why, he had replied that he could not take any more of it. Cliché mounted on cliché, one empty resolution followed by another, and the thing kept going on and on and on. “I don’t have to sit through that,” he had said.

My friend in New Delhi, the eminent journalist Inder Malhotra, who read last week’s Postcard on the penchant of our leaders for foreign travel writes, “Nehru always travelled by the service flights of Air India. Where Air India did not go, he took an Air Force plane. He never took an entourage of more than eight, including security and his valet, Hari; and, of course, daughter Indira. Now, the prime minister’s ‘aides’ are countless. As a very junior reporter in years gone by, I had read an article in Washington Post from Jakarta, declaring that whenever Sukarno faced a serious domestic problem, he ‘promptly solved it by leaving on a long foreign visit.’ That practice seems to have become universal since then.”

I also heard from Arnold Zeitlin, who was Associated Press correspondent in Pakistan in ZAB’s early years in office, and who now spends a good part of the year teaching journalism at a Chinese university. Zeitlin writes, “Your great boss, ZAB, answered this question years ago when he told me that whenever one comes back from a foreign trip, the first thing one does on stepping on to the tarmac is to declare the journey a great success, no matter what.”

And that brings me to the great Habib Jalib, who once told his Model Town companion and friend Rao Amjad Ali, now of Toronto, “Agar dauray se wapis aakay siraf yehi kehna hai kay bauhat kamiab tha to mujhay bhaij diya karain. Mera kharcha bhi kamm hoga: siraf Black Label ki aik addad barri botal.” Or, “If all one has to do after returning from a foreign tour to declare that it was a success, they should send me. I will cost them far less: just a large bottle of Black Label.”

I have also had a mail from Haris N Khan, senior editor, Pakdef Military Consortium, whose father was one of PIA’s most well-known and experienced captains. “A little correction,” he writes, “Prime Minister Gilani did not use PIA’s B-777 but rather PAF’s VVIP A-310 to fly to Kuala Lumpur and Dubai in style. Last time when we exchanged e-mails, this A-310 (AP-001) was parked at the Quaid-i-Azam International Airport, Karachi, awaiting a new engine. I think this was the reason…caretaker Prime Minister Mohammadmian Soomro took PIA’s B-777 for umra, but he could have easily taken PAF’s Gulfstream 430 for this visit.”

All I have to add to it is that “Bhambiri” Soomro should be known not as “caretaker” but undertaker prime minister.

Not all correspondents are quite happy with what they read, Meekal Aziz Ahmed being one, who thinks I “held back” in lamenting the lack of concern our travelling leaders have for the Pakistani taxpayer.

“If you are restrained and diplomatic and hold back, there is less chance that what you say will have an impact! They will just brush it off and twist things around and say, ‘Sir, actually he was quite positive!’ How is it they don’t realise that it is in their self-interest to pause, be honest, take stock and do something productive for a change?”

Well, all of us know the answer to Meekal’s question, I will let it go.

Every time a new government comes to office, people hope that it will be different but realise soon that all they have is a change of name. Nothing actually changes; things in fact get worse. There is also the quite mistaken belief that our domestic difficulties can be resolved through external diplomacy. It has not worked in the past; it is not going to work today; and it is will not work tomorrow.

Come to think of it, there is little need for our heads of state and government to travel abroad, unless it is absolutely essential and in the supreme national interest. The problems that are clobbering us at home will remain where they are, no matter how many B-777s the prime minister commandeers and no matter how many foreign lands he visits, including Easter Island. Most state-to-state business is carried out quietly behind closed doors without fanfare by unnamed, unsung officials sitting in windowless rooms. It has been seen though that the more dictatorial a government, the greater the desire of its leader to travel abroad.

All our leaders after Ayub Khan (who travelled only when necessary and always with a handful of people and, as far as possible, by commercial flights) have been profligate with their foreign travel. Shaukat Aziz “Shortcut” was more abroad than at home. And now that they require him at home to answer a few questions, he remains abroad. More often than not, foreign state visits have been used to provide all-expenses-paid holidays to court favourites, close friends, first cousins, in-laws, outlaws and whosoever has the connections to hitch a free ride.

The “successes” scored by the leader are beamed back home, watched by none. If our leaders will only pay more attention to their own country and less to foreign visits and foreign visitors, our troubles may not disappear entirely, but we will certainly see them lessen.

All this aside, we wait with bated breath in Washington for the arrival by officially hijacked PIA B-777 of the prime minister at the head of a party of 119, among whom there may be more than an even chance of finding a friend or two from Lahore. That is the only silver lining at least I am looking for in the approaching dark cloud.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

(Daily Times)

When Ahmed Saeed was made PIA chairman some years ago, a curious out-of-work young man wanted to know what the new chairman’s credentials for running an airline were. He was told that the chairman was the scion of a house that had sold millions of pairs of Hawaii chappals to the world. So there.

Many chairmen has the airline had since. One would need a calculator to get the number right. The airline still flies, barring those in between times when it gets grounded for one reason or another in this or that part of the world. In the old days, such an outrage would have been unthinkable. People still looked on PIA as a national asset and something of which they could rightly be proud. The airline’s record for on-time takeoffs and landings was exemplary. Few of its rivals in the trade could match it. PIA had some of the world’s best pilots and its cabin service was something to remember; and it never failed to treat its passengers, no matter what class they were travelling, with care and courtesy. PIA helped set up at least three airlines, including Singapore Airlines, the best in the world. What a pity I am writing this in the past tense. A friend said to me the other day that it was foolish to expect PIA to fare any better than other things Pakistani, public or private. After all, he argued, PIA is not an island; it has to reflect all the ills of our society.

I fear he may be right, which is why we might fasten our seat belts for a nostalgic flight back into the past. Few people remember when the airline was formed; how it was run in the early days; and how it dealt with its triumphs and tragedies, such as the 1965 Cairo crash. We never think of the men and women who kept PIA aircraft flying in good weather and bad, in home skies and over foreign lands, carrying Pakistan’s name and its colours (no longer to be seen today, the green having been repainted in lily white). Several years ago, one of the airline’s architects, Enver Jamal, wrote a book about his life and times in the flying business. He came to PIA in the 1950s and rose to become its managing director. In the beginning, PIA was a division of the Civil Aviation Authority, dependent for its needs on a rather pompous Group Captain. Everything else has changed in the years since, except that PIA continues to get more than its share of Group Captains and above, some of them perhaps even pompous.

PIA emerged from Orient Airways, which began life before independence at the initiative of the Quaid-i-Azam himself. The Quaid, Jamal wrote, wanted Pakistan, when it took birth, to have a reserve air fleet with trained technical personnel, pilots and administrative staff. He felt that the new country must have an airline to maintain a physical link between its East and West wings.

Over the years, PIA has been headed by many men, some as outstanding as Air Marshal Nur Khan, others as devoid of merit or flair as an air marshal who looked like everyone’s uncle but came down like a ton of bricks on anyone who displeased him. Then there was Air Marshal M. Asghar Khan, who preferred to be known as “president.” Those were Ayub Khan’s days and the Field Marshal wasn’t amused when informed that there was another claimant to his title. However, being the gentleman he was, he let things be. The title of president went out with Asghar Khan. There can be no question that the greatest of PIA chiefs was Air Marshal Nur Khan, who made the airline what it became. It was he who put money into sports and used PIA’s resources and patronage to win much glory for Pakistan in squash and hockey. He later did the same for cricket. There hasn’t been a better organiser and leader of men than the Air Marshal, who even today would give anything he takes over a run for its money. There are many Nur Khan stories; but let me just narrate one. Whenever one of his officers went to him with a problem, the Air Marshal would ask, “Have you also brought a solution?” If the answer was no, the man would be sent back and asked to return when he had a solution.

Enver Jamal’s book will bring back many sad memories too. It contains a picture of the lovely PIA stewardess Momi Gul Durrani, who died in the 1965 Cairo crash. She used to be the face by which the airline was known in those days. Ironically, she was not supposed to be doing the 1965 inaugural flight to Cairo, but agreed to go when the girl originally on the roster fell ill. The Cairo crash killed so many journalists, travel trade executives and PIA officials. One of the airline’s most outstanding officers, Jimmy Mirza, was on the Cairo flight. Also lost were journalists Hamid Hashmi and M B Khalid. Among the travel trade people who died was Majid Almakky, a man of great versatility who founded the Allied Press in Lahore as well as the Tareekhi Majlis; who edited the first art magazine in Lahore, Nargis ; and who printed the first English translation of Saadat Hasan Manto’s stories by Hamid Jalal, entitled Black Milk .

PIA was the first airline in Asia to fly jets. It was also the first non-communist airline to fly to China during Air Marshal Nur Khan’s time. The first “proving” flight was made by a Super Constellation, commanded by the legendary PIA captain Abdullah Baig, the airline’s flying ace. Jamal recalls in his memoir, “I will remember standing in the cockpit when Abdullah first established contact with the Chinese controller. In faultless English, we were welcomed by the people of China who sent us their greetings. Captain Baig returned the greetings on behalf of the people of Pakistan.” The first Boeing to fly to China was piloted by another PIA legend, Captain Taimur Baig, and his co-pilot Captain Ali Khan, who landed on a brand new runway at Canton. The historic landing is recorded in a photograph showing the two captains, with a very young Omar Kureishi in the middle. They are being escorted by three little girls, two Chinese, one Pakistani. Another photograph Enver Jamal has fished out shows Air Marshal Nur Khan in a dark suit and Jinnah cap leading the Pakistan delegation on PIA’s inaugural Shanghai flight. He is shown smiling, something he was seldom caught doing.

The last time I flew PIA, I thought of Nilofar Javeri, who used to be on most presidential flights in the 1970s, both because of her stunning looks and her sunny temperament. Alas, queries made earlier this year showed her living in Nairobi and wearing a hijab. Such is life.

(Friday Times)

For correspondents who did not arrive with President Musharraf and who did not leave with him, but who labour locally at the second oldest profession in the world, life has been rather quiet since the Generalissimo left town. Contact with officialdom, represented here in various forms embracing different layers of the imperishable Pakistani pecking order, always minimal, is now less then minimal. And that is not a bad thing because only a fool walks too close to the rear end of a horse and the front end of Pakistani afsar log.

We have seen governments come and go — mostly go — in Pakistan but what remains immortal and indestructible is the world of the afsar log. Only last week, I was advised — being the translator of the only first-hand account of what Miss Fatima Jinnah was like — that if I sent a message to a certain additional secretary in Islamabad to the effect that I would ‘feel honoured’ to be invited to the big do in Karachi later this month as part of the hastily declared Fatima Jinnah Year, I could soon be winging my way to Pakistan.

When I told friend Kishwar Naheed of it, she said some people never learn and I should do what I was told. Then she added that it had taken the Foreign Office just under two and a half months to locate her in Islamabad and pass on an invitation to her to attend a conference abroad. The last confirmation date for those invited was May 15, which was exactly a month and a half in the past when the Foreign Office finally got to her. Obviously, local mail delivery in Islamabad is slow.

But here in Washington, the new Pakistani chancery on International Drive, off the upper reaches of the interminable Washington artery, the Connecticut Avenue (which all good Pakistanis pronounce Connect-ee-cut Avenue), has managed to get its central airconditioning plant going again. It only crashed when President Musharraf was there. Who says Pakistani bureaucracy lacks a sense of timing! The phone system that had gone down a day or two later has also been restored. It is another matter that when you call, a nice American woman’s voice informs you that you have just been connected to the Embassy of Pak(rhymes with lack)-is-tan(rhymes with man). “If you know your party’s extension, dial it now” you are informed next. Of course, you don’t know your party’s extension because the new extensions are ‘for your eyes only’ and have not been circulated. But that apart, the phone system is working; whether those at the other end are, I leave to the reader’s imagination. But back to the President.

If you had taken one look at a typed copy of his programme in Washington, you would have had a dizzying spell. It was fuller than a tin of sardines. I am sure when the President left, he must have thanked Ambassador Ashraf Jehangir Qazi for having left him a few hours each night to catch some sleep. Those who plan these ridiculously crowded itineraries do so in order to impress the visiting VIP and show him to what lengths they have gone to obtain appointments for him. The obvious does not occur to them. Does the poor VIP not need time to throw off his shoes, get into a pair of slippers, pour himself a drink and think, just think. The human brain is not made of mechanical parts; it needs rest. Actually so do machines with mechanical parts. If you run them without a break, they crash, just as the airconditioning did.

OK, Gen. Musharraf is an old soldier and a commando to boot who has jumped into cold rivers in the middle of the night, and during training marches subsisted on stuff that you wouldn’t put on your table, but the way he was pushed from one to the next appointment, made even his enemies feel sorry for him.

He was taken to places where he should not have gone. The Washington Post for one, which returned the compliment by first printing a nasty article by an established Pakistan-baiter and then printing an even nastier editorial. In olden times, if a courtier had treated his king in like manner, he would have been dealt with through a single royal command, “Off with his head.”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

While we brace ourselves here for the impending visit of the prime minister to Washington later this month, one shudders to think what it would cost the poor people of Pakistan who lack clean drinking water and pollution-free air, who face galloping prices and brutal power outages through a sizzling summer. The prime minister, whose wardrobe I have begun to envy, has been advised to bring no more than 19 people to Washington — and that includes the spooks — but as night follows day, he is likely to bring 119.

Why do Pakistani leaders, the military variety no less than the other kind, travel so much and what is it that they seek? At the end of each visit, there comes the declaration that it was a “great success”. In what way it was a great success has never been revealed. There is a simple test of measuring success. If the hundreds of foreign visits undertaken by our leaders in the last nine years have been such successes, how come we are in the mess in which we are?

Some of them begin well like Gen Musharraf, but soon lapse into the same old rut. In his early days in power, the General not only used to take commercial PIA flights, as far as possible, but bring only those who had officials reasons to be there to assist him. Journalists, his media relations man Rashid Qureshi told me once in New York, were being made to pay for themselves. Since no good thing lasts long in Pakistan, neither did this.

The information ministry of the time, unhappy at the loss of its power to confer patronage and cuddle the usual suspects, sabotaged the commendable system that had come in with the change of guard in Islamabad. It started to slip the required amount of dollars in the right pockets and make the recipients fly on their own to places which the General was going to visit.

This fig leaf, like all fig leaves, fell to the floor before long, and the old blatancy returned. I don’t blame the ministry so much as my own tribe. I once heard a wise man in Sialkot say: “If the housewife has forgotten to put the lid over the saucepan of cooked food, the house pet should show some class instead of gobbling it all up.” The size of those ferried to these trips also returned to its traditional size. The Pakistani citizen in whose name all is done remained unaware of what he was paying for and why. Neither did anyone ask him.

The high water mark of crass indifference to public funds and how they are spent came with the 18-day long trip that the president took, partly to promote his book, which, let me add, was never destined to stand on the same shelf as War and Peace. But that is all in the past. Let’s look at the new boys who are getting old, having gone past the 100-day mark without showing much, if anything for it.

The honeymoon is over and done with. But in the 100 days he has been prime minister, he has not let any grass grow under his feet. He has been on the wing. Are our politicians perhaps descended from Sinbad Jahazi? The matter needs to be investigated.

I want it noted that in all our history, nobody has made more foreign visits at state expense that Muhammadmian Soomro, chairman of the Senate, to whose resume the permanent establishment also chose to add caretaker prime minister. In the couple of months he flew that flag, he was more away than home. To this I should add that the man he had replace, S A Shortcut, once came to the UN for an utterly routine meeting held in a room that could seat only 40, while the size of Shortcut’s “delegation” was 45. What could those poor people do, therefore, but shop till they dropped.

When Soomro went to Saudi Arabia for Umrah, it cost the PIA, whose Boeing 777 he had commandeered, $2.8 million. Every time a Pakistani VVIP travels, the plane carrying him has to be reconfigured, with special sleeping quarters and reclining chairs and the like. The flight to Jeddah takes four hours and Soomro could easily have taken a regular PIA flight. He wasn’t even invited officially to the Kingdom.

But what did he do? He spent four days there and the Boeing remained parked at the Jeddah airport all four days. Have these people no sense of decency or shame!

When I mentioned Yousaf Raza Gilani taking a 777 to Kuala Lumpur, with a stopover in Dubai on the way back to meet the man who encompasses the entire English alphabet in his name, my friend Meekal Aziz Ahmed said:

“It is not only a case of only pulling an aircraft out of service and disrupting the whole schedule, which means millions of rupees in lost revenue because PIA does not have ‘spare’ aircraft it can press into service. The service is simply cancelled and the schedule re-adjusted. It needs to be refitted with VVIP configuration (you don’t expect the PM to sleep on a sleeper bed like every commoner who flies Business Class, and not a real bed, do you? And, God forbid, dress in the loo!), seats are pulled out, a new curtained-off enclosure put together, etc. So it is not just a ‘plain’ 777 by any means. It costs millions and I understand that PIA is seldom if ever reimbursed.”

He also wanted to know, “But why are you surprised?”

He is right. Why am I surprised? After all, didn’t the Quaid himself say after Pakistan to Admiral Ardeshir Cowasjee’s father that every government in this country was going to be worse than its predecessor. The old man got that one right too.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

(Daily Times)

What was once a game of gentlemen has fallen on ungentlemanly times. Think of a scandal, from match fixing to cheating to doping, and you can have your pick of the cricketers whom it will fit like a glove. The dividing line between cricket as it used to be, and what it has become, came when Kerry Packer threw in his big bucks to buy off players. The heroic attempt by skipper Abdul Hafeez Kardar to block this slide down the hill of greed failed.

Few now remember that the villain of the piece in Pakistan was Abdul Hafeez Pirzada whose portfolio had put him in charge of cricket. As Kardar wrote in his 1995 book Failed Expectations , “I had played cricket with players who were disciplined and devoted to their teams. But a great change came that disillusioned me about the future of Pakistani cricket. This came about with the advent of the Australian Kerry Packer. The episode could have been handled, as I had proposed doing, by enforcing discipline and loyalty among Pakistani players. But for the fact that a strange twist took place when the government first damaged the image of the Board of Control for Cricket in Pakistan as an institution and later encouraged defiance among players. The man responsible for sponsoring defiance of the institution of cricket was the then minister of education Abdul Hafeez Pirzada, who was also in charge of sports. He had no experience of national or international cricket but used his office to supplement his lack of experience by sowing the seeds of indiscipline by which our cricket continues to be afflicted. Defiance, coupled with greed, damaged loyalty and inculcated misconduct on and off the field.” Kardar described Pirzada –whose name and legal conduct is identical to that of the Jadoogar of Jeddah – as “the pernicious destroyer of national expectations of cricket and cricketers.”

Memories of the skipper were triggered a few days ago when I learnt with much sadness that Zulfiqar Ahmed, one of the handful of surviving members from the team that scored a historic victory over one of the best England teams of all time at the Oval in 1954, is “critically ill” in Lahore. Zulfiqar was a great wit and always kept the team in stitches, especially when times were bad, with his storehouse of funny stories. The Kardar-led team that beat England by 24 runs in the final test, played at the Oval from 12 to 17 August 1954, consisted of Little Master, the great Hanif Mohammad; his co-opener Alimuddin; Waqar Hasan; Merry Max Maqsood Ahmed; Wazir Muhammad, one of the four phenomenal Mohammad brothers; Shujauddin Butt; Mahmood Hussain; Zulfiqar Ahmed and, last but not least an Oval hero, the incomparable Fazal Mahmood. Only Hanif, Alimuddin, Imtiaz, Wazir and Zulfiqar are still alive – and may they live long and happy lives. The England team that Pakistan beat had some of the greatest English cricketers of all time. Just consider their names: Hutton, Simpson, May, Compton, Graveney, Evans, Tyson, Wardle and Statham. Pakistan won the toss and was bundled out for 133, but Fazal with his 6 for 53 wrapped up the English innings for 130. Pakistan totaled 164 in the second innings, setting England a goal of 168 to win. But it was Fazal’s day again and he sent the England team home for 143, taking 6 for 46. His total haul was an incredible 12 wickets for just 99 runs.

Kardar was one of the few to have played test cricket for two countries, India and Pakistan. He was a member of the last team from undivided India to tour England in 1946. He had made his mark earlier against the Australian Services team, when he scored two centuries, one a double. Jack Fingleton wrote in his memoir Batting from Memory that on the 1948 Australian tour of England – Bradman’s last – the cricketer he was most impressed by was the young Abdul Hafeez who bowled, fielded and batted with quicksilver brilliance. Kardar, who stayed back after the tour to go to Oxford, was the only player to score a double for Oxford three years running. From 1947 to 1949, he scored a thousand runs and took a hundred wickets year after year, a record that is yet to be broken. One of Kardar’s closest friends was the explosive Australian all rounder Keith Miller, who wrote to him when one-day cricket came into vogue, “that is not cricket as we played it, dear Hafeez.”

When Kardar died in 1996 – he was just 71 but had suffered a series of heart attacks over the years – Tony Pawson, who played with him at Oxford, wrote of him in the Widen Monthly , “Whether the score was 370 for 3 or 37 for 3, the bowler fast or slow, his response to his first ball was always the same. He would dance down the pitch and hit it back over the bowler’s head. The face of a county opener treated like this when fired up by two quick wickets was a study in bewilderment.” Pawson recalled another memorable episode from those days, and one which brought a “bewildering decision” from Frank Chester, perhaps the greatest umpire the game has known. “Hafeez hit a fast bowler’s first delivery to him straight back onto the pavilion steps. Chester signaled a four. Having waited long enough to ensure the imperious umpire accepted it as an enquiry rather than a protest, I asked the reason. Frank said Hafeez should have shut the gate behind him and had he done so the ball would have hit it. Such an arcane ruling left Hafeez and myself baffled; and by Murphy’s Law, Hampshire later avoided the follow up by one run.”

In another match with Oxford losing, in walked Hafeez and “varied his normal opening gambit by dancing sideways and trying to sweep with the spin.” He missed thrice and on being reminded by his partner at the other end, Pawson, that their best hope was for a draw, tried the same shot after nodding agreement and was bowled. In one university match he batted so audaciously that Jim Swanton wrote the next day in The Telegraph that while other Oxford batsmen made batting look difficult, Hafeez made it look quite impossible. The team had to restrain Hafeez from looking all over Lord’s, where the match was being played, to get even with Swanton. When the skipper died, Trevor Baily wrote, “The pride he felt in Pakistan as a country, and as a cricketing nation, was reflected in the zeal he showed in conference. Among the contentious matters he tackled head on were a complete ban on playing against South Africa; the holding of ICC meetings away from Lord’s, with Lahore as the favoured venue; the abolition of founder membership of the ICC; and the banning of bouncers.”

I don’t think we will see his like again.

(Friday Times)

Short of Indiana Jones materialising in Pakistan, removing the sitting judges of the present Supreme Court and replacing them with the ones General Musharraf sent home last November, there appears little chance of putting the clock back.

Aitzaz Ahsan’s flying visit to Washington and New York seems to have been in vain as Uncle Sam is neither willing to intervene nor actually keen on the old judges coming back. The only comeback kids known in this country are prizefighters and those comebacks happen more in movies than in real life. Remember Rocky.

Every time an American official has been asked about the restoration of the judges deposed by Gen Musharraf in one swift swoop, the answer has been the same. “The US believes in a free judiciary but this is a matter internal to Pakistan and can only be resolved in Pakistan itself.” Translated into simple English, it means: No comebacks.

As for the Pakistanis settled here, they are a spitting image of their countrymen back home. There is little tolerance for the other’s point of view and public display of temper is considered good form, being always in evidence. Arguments are not won by reason but by shouting louder than the opponent. Anyone found in disagreement is declared a traitor and sometimes even beyond the pale of Islam.

There is no dialogue, only declamatory denunciations. Conspiracy theories are not only rampant but fervently believed. It is widely believed that the 9/11 attacks were engineered by a grand international cabal, controlled by Tel Aviv, to give Muslims in general and Arabs in particular a bad name. Why did the twin towers fall on to themselves in a heap, you are asked. If told that engineering studies have established that they fell as they were supposed to fall in such a catastrophic event, you are told, “But of course, that’s what those studies will say. What else would you expect?” I have of course stopped contradicting those who swear that on that day, all the Jews working in the twin towers were told not to turn up. The frequency with which I have heard this may soon induce me to start believing it myself.

The advent of the Pakistani TV channels has been a disaster in many ways. You go to any Pakistani home and one or the other of these channels is on. The mullahdom of Pakistan, which has taken to TV as a duck takes to water, now enjoys a trans-Atlantic audience. On one such programme, I heard a lady in New York ask by phone from a bearded gent in circus-worthy headgear and gown if after taking a shower, it would still be necessary for her to perform ablution for offering namaz. “Most certainly, otherwise you will be in a “na-paak” state.”

All Pakistani TV drama serials, without exception, revolve around marriage and domestic bickering caused by marriages that have either taken place or marriages that have not taken place. I have yet to hear of a serial dedicated to any other theme. In a country as grossly, almost indecently, populated as Pakistan, marriage ought to be discouraged rather than promoted.

But to return to the visits of Aitzaz Ahsan, Ahsan Iqbal and Justice Wajihuddin and their public meetings, it was quite clear that the local PPP cadres were under instructions from party headquarters back home to cause disruption. The way these three were questioned and often interrupted with identically worded questions betrayed the origin of those questions. Local PPP jiyalas attacked the visitors frontally and, in some cases, through newspaper advertisements.

Right in front of me, I have a full-page ad inserted by eight New York PPP men headlined “Judges with dead consciences turned a dictator into a king-maker,” followed by a charge sheet. Highlights: The Supreme Court was guilty of high treason when a democratic government was overthrown in 1999. The dictator’s favourite judges gave him the right to rule at will. That bench included Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Why did Chaudhry take oath under a PCO? Let the nation choose between the major and the minor criminal. If Musharraf’s November 2007 judges are illegal, so are those who took oath in October 1999. Did Asif Zardari, Yousaf Raza Gilani and Javed Hashmi, who were in prison for 11, 5 and 4 years respectively receive justice from the courts of Iftikhar Chaudhry and Wajihuddin? We will not permit any conspiracy against our leaders to succeed.

New York is home to several weekly Urdu newspapers, which are distributed free and since they cost nothing, they are picked up from grocery stores and read. But what reading do some of them offer? Here is the second lead from one. The headline informs readers that for the last eight years, the Pakistan government has been in the hands of Qadianis, an ugly conspiracy that has now been unearthed. Shaukat Aziz, Tariq Aziz, former ambassador Gen Durrani and several civil and military officials were involved in that conspiracy. The operations in the tribal areas were launched to crush the Sunni movement and establish control over the ISI and MI. There has been no investment in Pakistan by Europe or America in the last 61 years. Under the patronage of Sehba Musharraf, Citibank senior vice president Junaid Rabbani and other influential figures made contact with the Jewish lobby and Saudi princes. Pakistan was made to borrow heavily from the IMF and the World Bank at exorbitant interest rates, which is why the country is bankrupt today.

What I have translated were just the headline and sub-headlines. What the story proper contains it better not be put in a family newspaper. The same newspapers that carry these weird reports are quite undiscriminating when it comes to advertising. But for them, faith healers and mumbo-jumbo men in the city of Gujranwala will go out of business. Here, for instance, is “spiritual scholar, presidential award winner Pirzada Amjad Shah of Bukhari Chowk, Pindi Bypass, GT Road, Gujranwala” addressing “grieving brothers and sisters living in foreign lands”.

Each and every wish they have will be fulfilled, he promises. In just one night, through the power of Istikhara, every difficulty they face will be resolved. As for black spells cast on them, it will take just a couple of days to dissipate them. “One phone call can save your life. Let those who doubt try me.”

I have come to the conclusion that there is no future in journalism. I am applying to Pirzada Amjad Shah Bukhari of GT Road, Gujranwala to appoint me his spiritual ambassador to Washington. Who knows I may be asked by the Pakistani embassy to find an antidote to the black magic spell some swear it has been under for years.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Any day now, the Department of Homeland Security is going to announce that the dreaded snakehead fish is a member of Al Qaeda and, further, that it has entered the United States without a valid visa. So far there is no word that it has also sought admission to a flight school, but in the post-shock and awe or cut and run era that began June 28, 2004, anything is possible. If pigs have wings, then surly fish can fly. These days, anyway, all the flying that needs to be done is done by computers.

Pilots are the mannequins of the air travel business, the only useful members of the crew being stewards and stewardesses. About the latter, I might add that on account of gender-equality laws, stewardesses can no longer be grounded because they look like Aunt Bertha. So, if you want to be served a vodka martini, stirred or shaken, by a svelte apsara you are advised to fly Singapore Airlines. But, none of this has anything to do with the fish called snakehead.

What a pity the snakehead turns out not to have Muslim or Arab origins which would have made it merge seamlessly with the present landscape in America. But it is the next worse thing: Chinese or Korean, but not South Korean, the good guys, but North Korean, the bad guys who keep thumbing their nose at Bush and buddies, brandishing their Big Cracker. Why North Korea is not invaded for weapons of mass destruction that it says it has is a big secret that will only out when the Man from Crawford has gone to Crawford.

The snakehead was first heard of a couple of years ago when it made an appearance in a pool of still water in Crofton, a Maryland suburb of Washington. Since it was said to be able to “scoot on land,” it was the FBI and the Secret Service’s opinion that instead of risking the snakehead’s sneak arrival in the Oval Office or Dick Cheney’s bunker, a tactical nuclear weapon with controlled fallout should be used to destroy the pool where the fish had been found. After several high-level debates, this somewhat dramatic but effective method of dealing with the snakehead menace was ruled out. Instead, the pool where the snakehead had been found was first poisoned, then drained. I am told it was with some difficulty that the president was persuaded not to go on national television and proclaim victory. Well, just as well, because the snakehead reappeared the following year, and in another Maryland pool. Navy seals were ordered to jump in and scour the bottom. They found nothing. Finally, the pool was drained and the public reassured that the there was no longer any threat to the American way of life.

Many were dreading the arrival of summer this year, fearful that like Zorro the fish will return. They were right. David A Fahrenthold of Washington Post who is the newspaper’s snakehead specialist reported on the last day of June, “One fish was a worry. Two fish were a troubling trend. Now that the total is up to nine, some scientists say they’re close to conceding: the snakehead is in the Potomac river, and likely to stay.” We next learn that in the last seven weeks, this “Asian transplant that can breathe air and scoot slowly over land” has been caught in a 14-mile stretch of the Potomac and its tributaries. In other words, it is the end of civilisation as we know it.

This being Wimbledon time, it is game, set and match to the snakehead, which now being in open waters, can neither be poisoned nor drained. The description of the fish provided in the Post story makes it the first cousin if not blood brother of politicians as it is said to “feed chiefly on other fish.” We are also warned that it could throw the Potomac ecosystem out of balance. A Maryland official calls the arrival of the snakehead in open waters “the first act of the nightmare.” No baby snakeheads or eggs have been found so far, but every intelligence agency in America is looking for them. Could the Chinese and the North Koreans have released adult snakeheads in the river to confound the Americans? You can put nothing past these communists.

Where there is a fish, there is a fish story. Here is one featuring the snakehead. One Cliff Magnus claims to have caught a snakehead after a struggle reminiscent of Hemingway’s ‘Old Man and the Sea.’ “I knew it was a monster,” he says. So what does he do next? He hits it over the head five or six times with a pair of pliers, but gives up. The fish remains alive more than four hours out of water and is still flopping when Maryland officials come to take it away to a secret location.

If the snakehead does establish itself around the nation’s capital, you may have President Bush reading ‘My pet snakehead’ to third graders instead of ‘My pet goat,” which is said to be his favourite story.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

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