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Old Sunday, September 20, 2015
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Default Sep 13, 2015

Smokers’ Corner: World of the news


Last week local TV channels began reporting that the Habib University in Karachi was under attack. They also claimed that security personnel had entered the university because they believed that some terrorists were hiding there.

Alas, no such terrorist was found from inside the university. But the police and Rangers did find a couple of TV reporters there. They were seen running from one classroom to the other mouthing sound effects of gun fire (dhishoom, dhishoom!) in their microphones.

Well, such is the pressure on TV reporters to produce dramatic news on a constant basis. One TV reporter who was said to have taken out the most convincing sound of gun fire from his mouth during the (non)-siege at the university, said that most TV reporters these days are given special training to mouth sound effects.

He said, “we are trained to take out (from our mouths), sound of all kinds of gun fire. Machine gun, rifle, pistol, 9mm, .45 magnum, you name it.” He also informed that the repetitive swashing sounds heard during breaking news (Shoosh! Shoosh!) are also taken out by TV channel personnel. “But those effects are mouthed by newscasters alone,” he explained. “They are trained to keep punctuating reading the breaking news with these sounds. It’s quite a remarkable ability, really,” he added.

Reinventing some breaking news from last week, Paracha packs a hilarious punch
However, the TV reporters were confronted by some parents of the students who were at the university during the (non)-siege. They accused the reporters and their channels of creating unnecessary panic and worries for the parents.

In response, some reporters managed to pacify the enraged parents by taking out sounds of various pleasant birds and then entertaining them with sound effects of a Ping-Pong game. TV channels reported that the matter was settled amicably.

Meanwhile, in other news, newspapers reported that a local court in the capital city of El Salvador has issued warrants for the arrest of Altaf Hussain. The judge noted that since everybody else was doing it, why shouldn’t he.

So far almost every court across Pakistan has issued warrants against MQM chief, Altaf Hussain. Even tiny courts operating in the country’s remotest areas have gone on to issue such warrants as well. For example, a court in Bara Zizri, one of the most remote villages in the country, issued a warrant against Altaf, even though the judge was not quite sure exactly who Altaf really was.

In his judgment the judge noted: “This decision is based on what village elder, Ghulam Qadir Ahmad’s son, Ghulam Nafees Ahmad, heard from his friend Junaid Bokhari who lives in Quetta and has cable service on his TV. Junaid told Nafees who then told Qadir who eventually told me, that courts all over the country were issuing warrant after warrant for the arrest of someone by the name of Altaf Hussain. Qadir told me that this was due to this man’s terrible singing abilities. Qadir also said that a warrant from me may also help our village’s name to appear in the media and remind the authorities that Bara Ziri is very much part of Pakistan and not Nepal.”

In other news, former president and the co-chairperson of the PPP, Asif Ali Zardari lambasted the Nawaz Sharif government for reviving the politics of the 1990s. In his statement issued from Dubai, Zardari stated: “Nawaz is returning to doing politics of revenge. He is reviving the politics of the 1990s. Even Wasim Akram and Waqar Yunus have begun to warm up!”

Pakistan’s ace fast bowler of the 1990s, Wasim Akram, told reporters that indeed he (Akram) did get a bit excited after reading Zardari’s statement but soon settled down after his son reminded him that grunge died with Kurt Cobain in 1994.

Akram’s former fast bowling partner, Waqar, too is said to have gotten a tad excited by the statement until he pulled a muscle and declared, “well, so much for the ‘90s coming back.”

Now, some news from neighbouring India: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit to the UAE and Saudi Arabia has been seen with increasing interest by the military-establishment of Pakistan. Modi has managed to strike a number of friendly economic deals with UAE and Saudi monarchies.

Commenting on the growing relations between India and the Gulf countries, a Pakistani military spokesman diplomatically hailed the newly enhanced relations between India and Pakistan’s brethren countries in the Gulf. He added: “To further strengthen these relations, India should remove its troops from the Indo-Pak Line of Control (LoC) and ship them to Yemen.”

The statement, however, did not go down well with the Indian military’s high command. Indian army chief, Yuvraj Mohan Asrani, issued a short but forceful response. He said: I warn Pakistan. Stop issuing such statements. Because remember, ‘hum angrezon kay zamanay kay jailer hain!’

The response from Pakistan’s military high command was equally short. In fact a lot shorter: ‘LOL!’

Meanwhile, right-wing Hindu militant outfit, the Shiv Sena, has suggested that “to answer Pakistan, Hindus will need to become human bombs.”

President of Shiv Sena, Uddhave Thackery, exhibited his approval of the declaration and issued a congratulatory statement to members of his outfit. The statement read: “I fully endorse your views, brothers. Mogambo khush hua.”

Experts have described this statement to be an aggressive expression of Militant Vegetarianism — an ideology born from consuming tainted cabbage while standing on one’s head during the yoga sessions of the 42-Day Challenge fitness programme.

Lastly, due to the ever-increasing trend of ugly spats on Twitter and Facebook (in Pakistan), Gillette has introduced special mouth-foam for a growing market of overtly opinionated Pakistanis. The product’s slogan is, ‘Little knowledge, big mouths, lots of foam!’

It is available in three unique flavours: Reactionary Green, Angry Red and Liberal Blue.

Source: Smokers’ Corner: World of the news
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, September 13th, 2015
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Default Sep 17, 2015

Revisiting the Al-Zulfiqar saga: What really went down


Last Monday (06 September, 2015), I received an e-mail from a Pakistani who claimed to be living in a European city.

He wrote that he had read my Sunday column in Dawn of 06 September, 2015, part of which was about how many members of the clandestine urban guerrilla group, the Al-Zulfiqar Organisation (AZO), who had reached Libya and Syria (from Kabul), were never heard from again.

He insisted that ‘a lot of the boys who ended up in Libya and Syria, did not vanish.’ According to him, some were still living in the mentioned countries, while many also managed to get political asylum in various European countries.

He claimed that he was once part of the AZO. To prove this, he shared dozens of photos that he had taken of himself and ‘the boys’ in Tripoli (Libya) and Kabul in the early 1980s. He claimed he is now settled in a European city.

His narrative was that AZO and its activities were demonised not only by the Ziaul Haq dictatorship (1977-88), but largely by men such as journalist and author, Raja Anwar.

Now this is the ironic bit. Anwar remains to be the only author who has written a detailed account of the life and times of the AZO (in The Terrorist Prince). The irony is that he was once actually a member of the AZO (in Kabul) and yet, many of his former comrades and even some respected journalists have continued to dispute the authenticity of the information that he provides in his book.

In the beginning
Anwar was a leftist student radical during the students and workers movement against the Ayub Khan regime in the late 1960s. He then went on to join ZA Bhutto’s populist Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) when it came to power in December, 1971. He was made an Advisor on Youth Affairs by Bhutto.

After the Bhutto regime fell in a military coup (by General Ziaul Haq) in July 1977 and Bhutto was arrested, Bhutto’s wife, Nusrat Bhutto, gave Anwar the responsibility of setting up spontaneous party cells that could be activated to hold situationist protests against the Zia regime. During a number of such protests, some young PPP supporters even set themselves on fire (in Lahore and Rawalpindi).

Anwar is from the Punjab city of Rawalpindi. In his book, he reminds the readers that most of the young men who went up in flames to protest against Bhutto’s arrest (and then trial) belonged to working-class Punjabi families. Bhutto was a Sindhi, and it seems Anwar made sure to point out that Bhutto’s most diehard supporters at the time resided in the Punjab.

He continues to mention this throughout his book and it is only in the latter half of the book that it becomes clear why he does this. He denounces AZO chief, Murtaza Bhutto (ZA Bhutto’s son), as being a ‘Sindhi feudal’ who didn’t care much about his Punjabi supporters.

After Bhutto was hanged through a controversial trial in April 1979, Anwar writes that the police was hot on his (Anwar’s) heels and he escaped to Munich, Germany, and from there he flew to Kabul, where he joined Murtaza and his brother, Shahnawaz, who had formed a small urban guerrilla outfit called the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

Kabul was chosen by the brothers because in 1978, Afghanistan had witnessed a coup d'état set into motion by the covert supporters and members of the country’s two main communist parties inside the Afghan military and air force.

Murtaza and Shahnawaz were in London when their father was hanged, whereas their mother and sister (Benazir) were in jail in Pakistan.

The brothers had organised rallies in London to put pressure on the Zia government, but after failing to get the dictator to halt Bhutto’s execution, Murtaza went into a rage and decided to topple Zia through guerilla warfare.

Anwar writes that Murtaza first approached radical Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi (for financial and logistical support). Gaddafi had been on very good terms with ZA Bhutto.

Intelligence expert Brigadier I.A. Tirmiz in his book, The Profile of Intelligence, claims that when Bhutto was on death row, Gaddafi had sent his Prime Minister to Pakistan on a special plane and asked Zia to put Bhutto on that plane and allow it to fly him (Bhutto) to Libya.

Zia refused and ordered the plane to fly back to Libya. Tirmiz then informs that in response to Zia’s rebuff, Gaddafi sent a ‘secret message’ to Bhutto’s wife stating that he was willing to send in special Libyan commandos to break Bhutto out from jail. Gaddafi planned to use Palestinian fighters associated with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) for the breakout mission.

In an article for The News (October 24, 2011), journalist and TV anchor, Hamid Mir wrote that this message was conveyed to Bhutto by his wife, but Bhutto rejected the ‘offer’ by stating that he didn’t want to escape and seek refuge in another country. This, Mir states, was told to him by a Palestinian diplomat who had apparently communicated the message to Nusrat Bhutto.

Tirmiz goes on to suggest that after Bhutto’s execution, Gaddafi set up a training camp near Tripoli to train early AZO recruits in guerrilla warfare. The training was imparted to the young Pakistanis by PLO men.

Anwar, in his account, claims that PLO had also agreed to supply arms to AZO (that was still called Peoples Liberation Army). But the ship in which the arms were being smuggled (from Beirut to Tripoli) was intercepted by Israeli authorities and the weapons confiscated.

Another source of possible support and funding that Murtaza explored was the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The family too had been on good terms with the Bhutto family. After Bhutto’s execution, it offered political asylum to Bhutto’s wife and children. Anwar writes that the UAE monarchy was willing to help Murtaza in this regard, but after Murtaza published his organisation’s first communique, UAE balked.

The communique described PLA (now renamed AZO) as a ‘Marxist-Leninist movement’ at war with the ‘illegitimate regime of Ziaul Haq’. A leading prince and minister from the UAE’s ruling family told Murtaza that the UAE did not want anything to do with a communist organisation. Also, the UAE was not on very good terms with Gaddafi who till then had been the main backer of the AZO.

In Kabul, Murtaza was left to bank (for logistical support) entirely on the Kabul regime and on Gaddafi. The Kabul government accepted to back AZO as long as it was useful to dent the Zia regime that (with the help of the Americans and the Saudis) had begun to facilitate the formation of various anti-Soviet mujahideen groups on the Pak-Afghan border. Soviet troops had entered Afghanistan in December 1979 and by early 1980 anti-Soviet Afghan insurgents had begun to gather on the Pakistan side of the border.

Students at the Kabul University hail the 1978 ‘communist revolution’ in Afghanistan. The ‘revolution’ triggered infighting between two factions of the country’s largest communist party and was only ‘stabilised’ by Soviet forces that entered Kabul in 1979.

By the time Anwar reached Kabul (in early 1980), the AZO had already lost almost its entire first batch of fighters. These were young men who had been youthful supporters of the PPP and had been trained in Tripoli, Libya and in Kabul. When they were sent back to Pakistan to carry out bank robberies (to raise funds for the outfit), some had been killed (by the police), while others got arrested.

They also pulled off an assassination of a civilian member of the Zia regime and a botched attack on one of the judges who had sent Bhutto to the gallows.

The second coming
In 1981, a second batch of young men reached Kabul through Pakistan’s anarchic tribal areas. They were helped on the way by Pukhtun members of a small militant Maoist outfit, the Mazdoor Kissan Party (MKK). Between 1968 and 1974, the MKK had fought a guerrilla war against the police in the Charsadda District of Khyber Pakhtunkwa (KP).

Again, most of the new entrants were members of the PPP’s student wing (PSF), and some also belonged to another left-wing student outfit, the NSF. Most of them arrived from the cities and towns of the Punjab and KP and from Sindh’s capital city, Karachi. They were all under 25 years of age.

One such new recruit was former President of PSF in Karachi, Salamullah Tipu. Tipu came from a lower-middle-class Urdu-speaking family in Karachi. He went to a local school and then joined the army as a teen in the late 1960s. He was, however, dismissed for ‘bad behaviour’. He joined college in the early 1970s and was recruited by the student outfit of the right-wing Jamat-i-Islami (the IJT).

He befriended some members of the left-wing NSF who convinced him to quit the IJT. In 1974, he walked out of the IJT to join NSF. A hothead and always spoiling for a fight, he became a muscleman for the NSF. However, in 1976, when NSF refused to give him a ticket to contest that year’s student union election at his college, Tipu switched sides again and joined the PSF.

He quickly rose through the ranks of the organisation and in 1978 he was made the President of the PSF in Karachi. According to Anwar, Tipu did not play any significant role in the anti-Zia protests that the PPP and PSF organised when Bhutto was in jail.

There is only scant information on him during this period.

However, in late 1980, after witnessing the IJT use sophisticated weapons during the increasing episodes of campus violence, Tipu began to form an armed wing within the PSF. The IJT at the time was supporting the Zia regime.

Then in early 1981 when an anti-Zia rally at the Karachi University turned violent, the protesting students set fire to a vehicle belonging to an army officer. The IJT was against the protest and tried to stop the agitation. It is alleged that the student outfit’s chapter at Karachi University then helped the police nab some of the agitating students. One of the arrested was Akram Kaimkhani.

I met Kaimkhani in London in 2011. I was visiting the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS University) as a guest speaker and bumped into Kaimkhani who was in the audience. He is settled there for the last three decades and hasn’t returned to Pakistan.

Kaimkhani told me that there was a protest against Zia at the Karachi University and it was triggered by the presence of an army officer on the campus: ‘He (the officer) was just there to either pick or drop a relative, but some students got agitated by his presence because Zia’s regime was really going after the progressive groups,’ Kaimkhani explained.

He added: ‘I was there just raising slogans, but after the officer’s vehicle was torched, I was nabbed by some members of the opposing student group, beaten up and handed over to the police!’

Kaimkhani’s classmate at the university, Abbas Nasir, agrees. Nasir who lives in London these days, went on to become a well-known journalist with the BBC and then the editor of Pakistan’s largest English language daily, Dawn.

Abbas told me (in 2012): ‘At the university I was not associated with any particular student outfit. But my sympathies were clearly with the progressive groups. Kaimkhani was a good friend. He wasn’t a radical, but like me sympathised with the progressive student outfits. I was there when the officer’s jeep went up in flames. I’m not sure who torched it. It was all very chaotic. The next day we heard that the protest had been attacked by some IJT guys, and that Kaimkhani had been nabbed by the cops. He was good friends with Tipu as well. Tipu respected him a lot. So when Tipu got to know what had happen, he rode into the university and (with his group), began hurling abuses at some students gathered outside an IJT camp. Then suddenly there was sound of gunfire. Bullets began to fly to and fro. The shootout was between Tipu’s group and a couple of IJT fellows. In the end, an IJT member was killed. We never saw Tipu again after that.’

French academic and author, Laurent Gayer, in his book, Karachi: Ordered Disorder quotes Kaimkhani as saying the weapons that Tipu and his group used against the IJT (that day) had actually been stolen by Tipu from IJT men! Kaimkhani went on to claim that Tipu had raided a van carrying a cache of pistols and AK-47s only days before the incident at the university. According to Kaimkhani, the van was being driven by members of the IJT when Tipu and some of his friends ‘raided it.’

With the cops looking for him, Tipu escaped to Peshawar and from Peshawar he walked across the Pak-Afghan border and entered Kabul.

Anwar’s account suggests that after two AZO men had botched an assassination attempt on Zia in Rawalpindi, he (Anwar) had a falling out with Murtaza. Murtaza got Anwar thrown in a jail by the Afghan intelligence agency, KHAD.

But why did Anwar have a falling out with Murtaza?

This question was also asked by eminent scholar and intellectual, late Eqbal Ahmad, in a detailed critique of Anwar’s book that he wrote for the London Book Review in 1998.

Ahmad also correctly points out that Anwar is at best vague about of the issue.

But Anwar does mention that after some botched operations by AZO men in Pakistan, he advised Murtaza to return to Pakistan and help out his mother and sister who had formed a multiparty alliance against the Zia regime. But why would Murtaza get him thrown in jail just for saying this?

The person who emailed me (henceforth the EmailMan), and who claimed he was at the AZO training camps in Libya and Kabul in the early 1980s, said that Anwar was suspected by Murtaza of ‘being Zia’s agent.’ He claimed it was on Anwar’s information (that he provided to his supposed ‘handlers’ in the Zia government), that some AZO men were arrested in Pakistan.

However, this is exactly what Anwar too alludes to in his book, but with a twist. He suggests that Murtaza was becoming ‘increasingly paranoid,’ and when Anwar insisted that AZO should launch a political struggle against the Zia regime, Murtaza accused him of being Zia’s agent and convinced the Afghan intelligence agency to throw him in jail.

But had KHAD really been convinced that Anwar was Zia’s agent, it would have certainly executed him. But it didn’t, even though Anwar lingered in his jail cell for another three years before he was allowed to leave Kabul. Unable to return to Pakistan after his release, Anwar flew into Germany where he got political asylum.

He returned to Pakistan only after Zia’s demise in 1988 and rejoined the PPP. He contested an election from Rawalpindi on a PPP ticket but lost. In 1995, he quit the party and joined the centre-right PML-N. He wrote his book in 1997, months after Murtaza was killed in a controversial police encounter in Karachi.

The EmailMan claimed that Anwar’s book can’t be accurate because he was in jail between late 1980 and 1984. ‘He was an outsider. He was not committed to the cause,’ he lamented.

Much of Anwar’s book is based on what he was told by Tipu who became Anwar’s cellmate in 1984. Tipu too had had a falling out with Murtaza and was being tried (by KHAD) for the murder of a man in Kabul. He was bitter towards Murtaza and thus one can assume that much of what he told Anwar in that cell was a mixture of truths and half-truths.

In his extensive review of Anwar’s book, Eqbal Ahmad writes:

‘It was Murtaza Bhutto who, for reasons Anwar does not make clear in his book, had him thrown into the notorious Pul-i-Charkhi prison of Communist-ruled Afghanistan. The Terrorist Prince is a bitter, largely secondhand account of Murtaza’s People’s Liberation Army, later named al-Zulfiqar …’

This is the crux of the argument of Anwar’s critics as well. Though some of his former comrades have accused him of being ‘Zia’s agent,’ most others have simply lamented that by lambasting Murtaza in his book, he had disrespected the memory of the dozens of young men who were killed, hanged or arrested (by Zia) during AZO’s so-called ‘revolutionary struggle.’

But to be fair to Anwar, his anger towards Murtaza is largely due to how Anwar began to see him. He described Murtaza to be an arrogant and reckless man who played with the lives of naïve young idealists. In his book, Anwar also lambasts Murtaza’s mother and sister (Benazir) who he accuses of alienating and ignoring young activists who had somehow managed to survive Murtaza’s reckless adventurism and Zia’s hangmen.

The EmailMan, however, insists that most AZO men had complete faith in Murtaza and it were ‘suspicious people’ like Raja Anwar who ‘have been used’ (by whom?) over the years to sketch a demonic portrait of Murtaza.

Murtaza’s daughter, Fatima Bhutto, in her book, Songs of Blood & Sword presents a vivid account of her father’s life in exile. Interestingly, she does not refer at all to Anwar’s book. She is, however, particularly harsh towards her aunt, Benazir.

Surviving members of the AZO too have been extremely critical of Benazir. In March 1981, when Tipu (and two other AZO men) hijacked a PIA plane from Karachi, Benazir publically denounced the hijacking and asked her brothers to end their ‘imprudent adventurism’ (because it was harming the movement that she had begun against Zia on the streets of Pakistan).

EmailMan is not a big Benazir fan. In his correspondence with me he went on to claim that over a dozen AZO men who had travelled to Austria in 1984 were arrested by the Vienna police on the information provided by Benazir. To him, Benazir was hell-bent on damaging Murtaza’s movement (to safeguard her own political interests).

I interviewed Benazir in 1993 for an English weekly and asked her about such accusations that had returned in the press on the eve of Murtaza’s return to Pakistan.

She had said: ‘All I wanted my brothers to do was to return to Pakistan and fight with me against Zia. I publically rejected his (Murtaza’s) tactics because they were harming the democratic struggle that we had started in Pakistan. His ways gave Zia the excuse to jail, torture and hang anyone he wanted to. So many young men went to the gallows just for politically opposing Zia. They were not criminals or terrorists. I had no clue what he (Murtaza) was up to or where his people were. All I knew was that his tactics were not correct …’

When Anwar was about to be released from the Kabul jail, Murtaza had gotten KHAD to throw Tipu in the same jail (1984). In a 2004 interview that I conducted of a cousin of Tipu’s (for a research paper), he told me that Tipu’s family still lies low.

‘His parents and siblings were not harassed by the police after Tipu was reported to have died in Afghanistan. But they just simply buried his memory. It was a painful memory.’

During the hijacking, Tipu’s father was picked up by the police and asked to talk to his son. Tipu refused to talk to him. After the episode, Tipu’s family never heard from Tipu again.

His cousin (who was a teenager at the time) said: ‘He lost his way. He was a very emotional man (jazbati). After the hijacking, his family was avoided like a disease. Their neighbors refused to talk to them, cops kept an eye on them, and the PPP disowned them!’

In the end, even Murtaza didn’t want anything to do with them because (according to Fatima Bhutto), Tipu was most likely ‘Zia’s agent.’

Fatima was told by her father that the hijacking was entirely planned and executed by Tipu most probably on the behest of Zia’s agencies. Even Benazir in her 1988 autobiography, Daughter of the East, is not sure what to make of the hijacking. She publically denounced it but says that (later on) she wondered exactly what the real motive was behind the hijacking. She alluded that most probably Tipu and his men had been ‘allowed’ to hijack the plane (by Zia), so he (Zia) could use it as an excuse to ruthlessly crush the 1981 MRD movement against him.

The MRD (Movement for the Restoration of Democracy) was a multiparty anti-Zia alliance formed in 1981 and headed by the PPP. It orchestrated three major movements against the Zia regime (1981, 1983 and 1986).

However, it is a matter of record that when Tipu and his men got the pilot to land the plane at Kabul Airport (from Karachi), he was in direct contact (on wireless) with Murtaza. Anwar quotes Tipu as saying that Murtaza even came to visit Tipu and had ‘hugged him.’

But even Anwar suggests that the whole plan was engineered and carried out by Tipu.

Tipu’s idol at the time was the notorious playboy terrorist ‘Carlos the Jackal’ who had worked with radical Palestinian groups and for various left-wing European militant outfits in Germany, Italy and France.

Anwar writes that Tipu saw the hijacking as a ‘great revolutionary act’ and in his excitement shot dead a Pakistani passenger after accusing him of being part of the Zia regime. He wasn’t.

Tipu told Anwar that he informed Murtaza that the man was claiming to be someone who had actually worked for Z A. Bhutto, but Murtaza had kept accusing him of being ‘Zia’s man.’

The man was shot dead by Tipu after the Zia regime refused to release the 50 odd men that Tipu had demanded should be released from Pakistani jails.

Anwar quotes Tipu as saying that the man was killed on Murtaza’s instructions, whereas Fatima claims that Murtaza had no clue what was transpiring inside the plane. She insists in her book that the hijacking was entirely the doing of Tipu and Murtaza was actually taken aback by it.

The truth may lie somewhere in between because Anwar suggests that AZO was desperately trying to get direct support from the Soviet intelligence agency, the KGB, and for that Murtaza had been desiring to pull off a dramatic act.

Anwar also suggests that the hijacking may not have been Murtaza’s idea, but since Tipu wanted so much to become ‘a star revolutionary,’ he gifted Murtaza the spectacular act that he was looking for.

The KGB had decided not to deal with AZO directly and had asked KHAD to facilitate the organisation. But after the murder of the Pakistani passenger, KGB advised the Kabul regime to ask the hijackers to leave Kabul.

Tipu and his men forced the pilot to fly the plane to the Syrian capital, Damascus. Syria was being ruled by another of ZA Bhutto’s friends, Hafizul Asad who, like Gaddafi, was also anti-Zia. The Zia regime finally agreed to release the men that AZO had demanded, but only after Tipu threatened to kill the dozen or so American and European passengers on the plane.

The released men were all political prisoners who had been rotting in Zia’s jails. One of them was Akram Kaimkhani.

Kaimkhani told me that not all the prisoners wanted to leave: ‘We were planning to fight it out here in Pakistan, but even those who didn’t want to leave, they were hastily bundled into a chartered plane and flown to Damascus. Zia was in a hurry to use this episode to begin a fresh crackdown against his opponents.’

Some of released political prisoners joined the AZO in Kabul, while others settled in Libya and Syria. Some managed to find political asylum in various European countries.

Tipu returned to Kabul, while the other two hijackers flew out to Libya. None of them ever returned to Pakistan.

The downward spiral
After the hijacking, Murtaza shifted to an apartment in Damascus. Though he was still AZO’s chief, Tipu became the organisation’s main man in Kabul.

As most of the AZO men remained living in the congested AZO headquarters in Kabul, Tipu was given a furnished apartment by KHAD and a brand new car. He, however, became even more reckless. He would get drunk and race his car up and down Kabul’s main roads, harassing bystanders.

Head of KHAD, Najibullah, admonished him for ‘resting on his laurels.’ And after Najib threatened to expel him from Kabul (apparently on Murtaza’s insistence), Tipu told Najib: ‘I am the real communist. Murtaza is a feudal. I am the true revolutionary …!’

According to Anwar, Murtaza was not happy about Tipu’s new-found ‘star status’. Tipu told Anwar that ‘out of jealously’ Murtaza got him implicated in a murder case in Kabul.

This happened after Tipu laid out his plans to attack US and Israeli embassies in certain European countries. He then shared with Murtaza his grandest plan, that of assassinating Zia during the dictator’s official trip to India! The idea was not shared with Najibullah because the Soviet Union was close to India and had a Pakistani head of state been assassinated in India, this could have implicated India or even started a war between and India and Pakistan.

Tipu travelled to New Delhi where Zia was on an official visit. According to Anwar, Murtaza gave Tipu the contact number of a man who was to supply him with the weapon that was to be used to assassinate Zia.

Tipu never got the weapon. He returned to Kabul fuming. Again, quoting Tipu, Anwar writes that Murtaza told Tipu that a certain man was responsible for the botched operation. Taking this as a signal to act against the man, Tipu shot him in a suburban residential area of Kabul. To his horror, he was immediately arrested by the Kabul police and thrown in jail. In mid-1984 he was sentenced to death and executed by a firing squad. He was 28.

By the time of Tipu’s execution, Anwar had already been released by KHAD. He left for Germany. After Tipu’s demise, Murtaza mostly operated from Damascus and the remaining AZO men were asked to leave Kabul by KHAD.

Some returned to Pakistan only to be arrested and jailed, while some, with great difficulty, managed to reach Tripoli. Qaddafi had closed down the training camp there. So the men stayed in Tripoli as second-class citizens. The few lucky ones finally managed to find political asylum in some European countries. None of them ever came back.

A group had been dispatched to the Austrian city of Vienna, where it was to storm and take over the Israeli embassy. The other option was to attack a gathering of western diplomats. But as the infighting between Murtaza and Tipu was raging in Kabul, all members of the group were arrested by the Vienna police and given long jail sentences of 15 to 25 years each.

After conducting repetitive reconnaissance of the Israeli Embassy and figuring out how they would storm it, they suddenly stopped receiving any new instructions from Kabul.

Soon much of their time was spent drinking beer and sleeping in parks and in cheap hotels. Not knowing what was transpiring in Kabul, they were finally apprehended by the police along with the cache of arms that they were carrying.

In 1985, the AZO began receiving its third batch of fighters. Most of these were young Sindhi-speakers from the interior of the Sindh province. Some of them were arrested and executed by the Zia regime when they returned to Pakistan to assassinate a pro-Zia politician in Karachi.

Anwar claims that by 1985, the AZO had become a militant Sindhi nationalist outfit.

Also in 1985, Shahnawaz was allegedly poisoned to death in Cannes, France. Benazir in her autobiography believes that Shahnawaz’s Afghan wife was somehow involved and (thus) working on the instructions of the Zia regime.

Murtaza folded the AZO in 1990 and returned to Pakistan in 1993. Some observers suggest that his return was ‘facilitated by those who wanted an open confrontation between Benazir and him.’ Benazir was in power when Murtaza landed in Karachi. He was immediately taken into ‘protective custody.’

Though the AZO had folded, its name was constantly used in 1990 by Sindh’s Chief Minister, Jam Sadiq Ali, who unleashed the police against the PPP on the pretext that many of its workers were working for the AZO.

However, when in 1992, the military began a ‘clean-up’ operation in Sindh, it went straight after dacoits and then alleged MQM militants. The AZO’s name suddenly vanished from the newspapers.

The curtain had come down on the Soviet Union, the Afghan conflict was coming to an end (for the time being at least), and left-wing militant outfits were being disbanded all over the world.

In 1993, Murtaza arrived in a very different Pakistan. Zia was no more, his sister was in power, and a new kind of a militant was emerging. A militant who justified his violence not through Marxist dialecticism or by quoting Lenin, Mao or Marx, but by claiming that his/her actions were being determined by the Almighty himself!

In 1996, Murtaza was killed in a controversial police encounter near his late father’s house in Karachi. The once dreaded AZO became just another (enigmatic) footnote of history.


What happened next?

General Ziaul Haq: Killed in a plane crash in 1988. The crash was allegedly caused by a bomb planted in the plane.

Benazir Bhutto: Elected Prime Minister twice (1988 and 1993). Assassinated (allegedly by extremists) in 2007.

Murtaza Bhutto: Returned to Pakistan in 1993. Killed in a controversial police encounter in 1996.

Shahnawaz Bhutto: Poisoned in 1985.

Salamullah Tipu: President of the PSF in Karachi. Joined the AZO in 1981. Executed in Kabul in 1984 for murdering an Afghan national. Education: College Graduate. Ethnicity: Mohajir. Age: 28.

Lala Aslam: An early AZO operative. Was dispatched to assassinate the Pope who was visiting Pakistan in 1981. Died while handling a time bomb he had constructed for this purpose. The Pope was being targeted for his ‘anti-communism’ statements. Education: Matric. Ethnicity: Pukhtun. Age: 23.

Nasir Jamal: Was Tipu’s classmate at college and one of the three hijackers of the PIA plane. Escaped to Libya after the hijacking. Is said to be still residing there. Education: College Graduate. Ethnicity: Mohajir.

Arshad Khan: One of the three hijackers. Escaped to Libya with Nasir Jamal. Current whereabouts unknown. Ethnicity: Mohajir.

Nasir Baloch: Arrested in Karachi for facilitating Tipu, Jamal and Arshad in the hijacking of the PIA plane. Hanged in 1984. Education: Matric. Ethnicity: Baloch. Age: 27.

Ayub Kabaria: Arrested in Karachi for helping Tipu. Jailed for 14 years in 1984. Education: Matric. Ethnicity: Mohajir.

Saifullah Khalid: Arrested in Karachi for helping the hijackers. Jailed for 14 years in 1984. Ethnicity: Pukhtun.

Razaq Jharna: PSF member. Joined the AZO in 1980. Arrested for the assassination of Chaudhri Zahoor Ilahi (a minister in the Zia regime). Arrested in Lahore. Hanged in 1983. Education: Intermediate. Ethnicity: Punjabi. Age: 24.

Lala Asad: Brother of Lala Aslam. PSF member. Became an AZO operative in 1980. Killed in police encounter in Karachi in 1981. Ethnicity: Pushtun. Age: 22.

Rehmatullah Anjum: PSF member. Joined AZO in the 1982. Killed in police encounter in Lahore in 1983. Education: Graduate. Ethnicity: Punjabi. Age: 24.

Javed Malik: PSF member. Joined the AZO in 1982. Part of the group that was sent to Austria to storm the Israeli Embassy and attack a reception. Arrested in Vienna in 1983 and jailed. Released in early 1990s. Returned to Pakistan. Jailed again. Released in 1995.

Usman Ghani: Joined the AZO 1981. Hanged in 1984 for assassination attempt on Justice Anwarul Haq. Ethnicity: Punjabi. Age: 25.

Idris Todi: Joined the AZO in 1982. Hanged in 1984 for assassination attempt on Justice Anwarul Haq. Education: Matric. Ethnicity: Punjabi. Age: 25.

Idrees Beg: Joined the AZO in 1981. Hanged in 1984 for assassination attempt on Justice Anwarul Haq. Education: Matric. Ethnicity: Punjabi. Age: 25.

Ayaz Samu: Sindhi nationalist. Joined the AZO in 1982. Arrested in Karachi for murder of a pro-Zia politician. Hanged in 1985. Education: Graduate. Ethnicity: Sindhi. Age: 24.

Ilyas Siddique: PSF member. Joined the AZO in 1981. Shot in Karachi in 1982. Education: Intermediate. Ethnicity: Mohajir. Age: 20.

Out of the eight AZO men arrested in Austria, only one managed to return. The whereabouts of an estimated number of two dozen more AZO men, who never returned to Pakistan are still unknown. However, some of them are known to be residing in various Libyan, Syrian and European cities.

Source: Revisiting the Al-Zulfiqar saga: What really went down by Nadeem F. Paracha
Published in Dawn, SEP 17, 2015
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Officers, gentlemen, revolutionaries


Former chief of the ISI, General Hamid Gul, who recently passed away, epitomised the way the Pakistan military began to see itself from the 1980s onwards. Influenced by ideological and strategic dynamics of the right-wing insurgency that Pakistan facilitated (during the General Zia dictatorship) against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, Gul remained to be a staunch advocate of the ideological mindset that was cultivated during the conflict.

This mindset, apart from being programmed into young insurgents, also proliferated across some influential sections of the Pakistan military. That’s why even after Zia’s demise in 1988 and Gul’s ouster as intelligence chief in 1989, a number of top ranking officers continued to be identified with this ideology, despite the fact that General Parvez Musharraf (who took over power in 1999), attempted to somewhat reverse the trend.

Recently, the new army chief, General Raheel Sharif, is attempting the same, trying to promote a more temperate outlook within the armed forces; or a point of view that can free the state’s war against religious militancy from any confusion that can arise within a soldier’s mind about an enemy that overtly uses religious symbolism and rhetoric.

General Raheel’s command is clearly signaling a shift on multiple fronts, gradually steering the military’s ideological narrative from the right to a more centrist disposition. It’s still a volatile undertaking because it is attempting to phase out a narrative that emerged in the 1980s and was then allowed to compound for various ‘strategic’ and political reasons.

Over the last three decades, fears of radical tendencies emerging from within the military have almost always had to do with some sections in the institution holding deep-seated intransigent thinking that was first refined during the initial Afghan conflict. But this wasn’t always the case. Because before the 1980s the radical tendencies in the same institution usually came in from the left.

Two men typify this bygone tendency the most: Major-General Akbar Khan and Major Ishaq Muhammad.

As a Brigadier, Akbar had directly led both regular and irregular Pakistani forces against the Indian military during the first Pakistan-India conflict (over Kashmir) in 1948. Field Martial Ayub Khan in his 1967 autobiography, Friends, Not Masters describes Akbar as an impulsive but brave soul and an ‘ambitious Young Turk’.

Remembering the quasi-communist coup attempt in 1951
Ayub who was made the army chief in 1950, and would then go on to head the country’s first military regime (from 1958 till 1969), wrote in his book that he was warned about Akbar by the outgoing military chief, General David Gracey.

Gracey described Akbar to be an ambitious man who was highly impressed by leaders such as Turkey’s secular nationalist, Kamal Ataturk, and had been extremely critical of the way Pakistan’s 1948 war with India had been handled by the country’s first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan.

It was this that saw Akbar fraternising with a group of ideologues and intellectuals associated with the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP). He planned to pull off a coup d’etat (with the help of a few army and police officers) against the Liaquat regime whom he accused of being a ‘stooge of the British.’

Hassan Zaheer in his 1998 book, The Times and Trial of The Rawalpindi Conspiracy, suggests that the plan was to arrest the top brass of the country’s political and opposing military leadership and use the CPP’s organisational skills to set-up a regime on the radical-nationalist model used by Ataturk in Turkey.

However, the coup attempt was nipped in the bud by the army when a police officer who was part of the conspiracy spilled the beans. The conspirators were arrested and sent to prison. These included Akbar Khan and his wife; some military and police officers; and leading members of the CPP, including famous Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmad Faiz.

After his release in the late 1950s, Akbar Khan became a fervent critic of the Ayub Khan regime despite the fact that, ironically, Ayub too was flexing himself to be a Pakistani Ataturk of sorts.

Akbar Khan joined Z.A. Bhutto’s left-leaning PPP in 1970 and formed an outfit called the Red Guards, a militia of left-wing youth who were charged to ‘defend PPP rallies from attacks from right-wing groups’.

In December 1971 when Bhutto rose to become President, he made Akbar Chief of National Security. He also advised the Bhutto regime during its controversial operation against Baloch insurgents after a Baloch insurrection erupted in the mountains of Balochistan in 1973.

After the fall of the Bhutto regime to a coup d’etat (July 1977), Akbar went into hiding and then briefly into exile.

On his return to Pakistan, he quit politics and became a recluse. He passed away in 1993 at the age of 81, forgotten by the changing tides of history. His death was only briefly reported in the press.

Another co-conspirator of Akbar Khan’s ambitious plan to topple the Liaquat regime was Major Ishaq Muhammad. Ishaq, an ardent fan of Chinese revolutionary, Mao Tse Tung, was one of the links between Akbar Khan and the Communist Party of Pakistan.

Captain Zafarullah Poashni, who too was arrested, wrote in his book, Zindagi Zinda Dili Ka Naam Hai (2014), that Ishaq was ‘a hothead’ who was inspired by the views on Marxism of CPP men such as Sajjad Zaheer and Faiz.

After Ishaq was released from jail in 1957, he joined the left-wing National Awami Party (NAP) and became an opponent of the Ayub regime.

Ayub was being attacked by NAP from the left (and later by the PPP), and by the religious parties from the right, as he held on to a modernist-centrist position.

In 1967 NAP broke into two factions. The pro-Soviet faction was headed by Pakhtun nationalist leader, Wali Khan and Baloch politician Ghaus Baksh Bizenjo, while the pro-China faction was headed by the Bengali peasant leader, Maulana Bhashani.

Though a self-claimed Maoist, Ishaq sided with the Wali faction, but in 1968 he broke away and with Afzal Bangash formed his own faction, the Mazdoor Kissan Party (MKP) Bangish and Ishaq led a group of MKP cadres and students to the hills of Hashtnagar in the Khayber Pakhtunkwa (KP) province to organise the peasants and prepare them for an armed uprising against the Khans (members of KP’s landed elite).

Between 1968 and 1974, MKP (along with the peasants) fought pitched battles against the police and the private militias of the Khans and occupied vast tracts of land until the movement was crushed in 1974.

Ishaq had a falling out with Bangash and decided to move the movement to rural Punjab. He eventually tied it to a movement for the recognition and revitalisation of the Punjabi language. He saw this particular movement as a revolutionary maneuver to empower impoverished peasants of rural Punjab.

Ishaq was jailed six times. The last time he was arrested was in 1981 when he was leading a movement against Zia’s dictatorship.

This time he suffered a stroke in jail and was paralysed. He passed away six months later. By then the ideological complexion of the military he had once been a soldier of was being radically changed, and the leftist tendencies that he was so much in awe of had already begun to gradually wither away.

Source: Officers, gentlemen, revolutionaries
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, September 20th, 2015
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The 1983 MRD Movement: The flasher’s version


In 1983, a movement against the Ziaul Haq dictatorship began to spiral out of control and threatened a full-scale civil war in the Sindh province.

Dozens of civilians were killed, hundreds arrested and many escaped into the thick forests near the cities of Dadu and Moro to (eventually) become dacoits.

A movement that had begun as a nationwide anti-Zia agitation, mutated into becoming a civil war of sorts between Sindhi nationalists and the state. The movement was eventually crushed with the help of the army.
One of the most intriguing characters of the movement was a middle-aged Sindhi man reportedly belonging to a small Maoist party, the Awami Tehreek.

His sudden claim to fame had to do with just one act of his: In September 1983, he had jumped in front of an armored limousine in which Zia was travelling (in Dadu), lift the dhoti he was wearing, and flashed his privates for the dictator to see, all the while shouting (in Sindhi), 'bhali karey aya, bhali karey aya' (‘welcome, welcome’).

He was arrested and never seen or heard from again.

The following narrative was weaved from one of the most detailed papers on the 1983 MRD Movement (written by Amir Ali, Mughal Ahmad and Fauzia Naseem for Berkeley Journal of Social Sciences); and an insightful paper authored by eminent political scientist, Khalid B. Sayeed, Pakistan in 1983: Internal Stresses More Serious than External Problems (University of California, 1984); and dispatches from BBC’s South Asian correspondents who regularly reported from the movement’s hotspots in the interior of Sindh.

Making the move
Though protests against the Ziaul Haq dictatorship had begun almost immediately after his military coup in July 1977, his regime’s harsh measures against any and all opposition did not allow opposition groups to organise themselves in a more coherent and systematic manner.

The beginning of the anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan in early 1980 had meant that the Zia regime was poised to attract recognition from the United States, and become its vessel to carry the large military and financial aid that the US and Saudi Arabia pledged as a way to back Afghan insurgents in Afghanistan. But it would take another few years for Zia to use this patronage to strengthen his position.

The Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) was formed in 1981. It was a multiparty alliance initiated by the left-leaning Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which, at the time, was being led by former Prime Minister ZA Bhutto’s widow, Begum Nusrat Bhutto, and her then 28-year-old daughter, Benazir Bhutto. Both had been in and out of jails ever since ZA Bhutto was executed through a controversial trial in April 1979.

The MRD included the centre-left PPP; the center-left Pakistan National Party; the far-left Awami Tehreek; the far-left Qaumi Mahaz-i-Azadi; the far-left Muzdoor Kissan Party; the centre-left National Democratic Party; the centrist Tehreek-i-Istaqlal; the centre-right Pakistan Democratic Party; the centrist Muslim League (Malik Qasim faction); and the right-wing Jamiat Ulema Islam, which was the only mainstream religious party that was opposing Zia.

Though the movement kicked off in early 1981, it took another two years for MRD to gather a more substantial momentum against Zia’s dictatorship.

But by 1983, Zia had consolidated his political position and revived the economy. Yet, this revival, which was largely built upon the substantial flow of US and Saudi aid that had begun to arrive, brought with it a new kind of institutional corruption and the initial emergence of thorny factors such as heroin/gun smuggling, and the mainstreaming of radical clerics who were propped up by the state to recruit and indoctrinate young Pakistanis and Afghans for the insurgency against Soviet forces in Kabul.

The battle for Punjab
The country’s largest and most populated province, Punjab, was a bastion of the PPP ever since the late 1960s. The party, though led by a Sindhi (ZA Bhutto), had swept the election in the province in the 1970 election and then again in the (latter annulled) 1977 election.

To dent the PPP’s support base in Punjab, Zia (an immigrant Punjabi), began to overtly patronise those sections of the province that had been adversely affected by the Bhutto regime’s haphazard ‘socialist’ policies. Such sections included prominent business groups of the province.

Zia’s economic policies were also designed to attract the support of Punjab’s urban middle and lower-middle-class traders and shopkeepers (or those urban sections of the province who had overwhelmingly voted for ZA Bhutto’s PPP in the 1970 election).

Zia then gradually aligned these sections with certain radical religious outfits that he had begun to foster. Thus, an economic revival witnessed during the Zia regime was accompanied by a burst of religiosity within Punjab’s bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie.

The MRD leadership reacted to this by deducing that the fruits of the economic revival witnessed (after 1980) were mostly falling in the hands of central/urban Punjab’s industrialist and business communities and the trader classes; whereas rest of the country (as well as working-class and rural Punjabis) were being ravaged by economic exploitation, the rising rates of crime and corruption, and the growing incidents of sectarian violence.

On August 14, 1983 (one year after Zia had gotten himself elected as ‘President’ through a dubious referendum), the MRD launched a movement against him.

Though the movement kicked-off simultaneously in Sindh and the Punjab, it failed to gather much support in the latter province. Soon, it became restricted to Sindh, where at one point, it treateningly began to look like it would turn into a full-blown Sindhi nationalist movement and even a civil war.

MRD activists and youth belonging to the student-wings of MRD parties and various left-wing Sindhi nationalist groups plunged into the fray and disrupted everyday life in Sindh. Sindh’s metropolitan capital, Karachi too, witnessed widespread protests by journalist, student and women’s organisations, but compared to the rest of the province, Karachi remained relatively unruffled.

In the interior of Sindh, the situation eventually became too hot for the police to handle and Zia had to call in the army. Dozens of MRD supporters were killed in the ensuing violence.

By September 1983, the movement had squarely become a militant Sindhi nationalist expression when Punjab failed to rise.

But why Sindh?
We have already discussed how Zia managed to change the political and social complexion of Punjab by initiating the gradual process of drying up the support that the PPP had enjoyed in that province.

But whereas he managed to also keep Balochistan quiet (after releasing Baloch nationalists who had been thrown in jails by the Bhutto regime); and with the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa caught-up in receiving waves of Afghan insurgents (termed as ‘guests’) and refugees (described as ‘brothers’), Sindh was largely left to its own devices.

Apart from the fact that there was already anger among the Sindhis against the hanging of a Sindhi prime minister, contributing to the violence in the province in 1983 was the feeling that Sindhis, as well as the Urdu-speakers (Mohajirs) in Karachi were being ‘invaded’ by elements that were posing a threat to their economic and political interests.

Firstly, from 1982 onwards, Karachi began receiving large numbers of Afghan refugees, some of whom came for the sole purpose of setting up illegal drug and weapons businesses in the city. This trend would go on to trigger the vicious circle of ethnic violence in Karachi from 1985 onwards.

Secondly, Zia began to allot lands in interior Sindh to Punjabis who were encouraged (by the regime) to migrate from Punjab to Sindh.

Zia did this to create a constituency for himself in Sindh. But what he received was resistance and resentment from the Sindhis and Urdu-speaking traders and members of the Sindhi landed elite.

In Karachi, Memon, Sindhi, and Urdu-speaking traders and businessmen formed an organisation called the Maha Sindh to ‘protect the interests of Sindh’s Mohajirs and Sindhis’. But this organisation was mostly centred in Karachi. It soon became an entirely Mohajir vehicle and would partly evolve into becoming the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) in 1984.

But the reaction to the regime’s manoeuvres was more violent in the interior of Sindh, where protesters turned militant and military troops had to be called in to quell the turmoil.

The flasher
Begun on August 14 1983, the MRD Movement had started to whirl out of control by early September, not only for the Zia dictatorship but for the main MRD leadership as well. Sindh was in serious turmoil.

In August, Sindh’s capital, Karachi (in the south), had witnessed court arrests and protest rallies on a daily basis by labour and trade unionists, student leaders and anti-Zia politicians. But in September, the focus of the movement had shifted to the central and northern parts of Sindh that got caught in a whirlpool of violence.

The MRD movement here had begun to take the shape of a Sindhi nationalist uprising bordering on an insurgency against the state.

Faced with a volley of questions (mainly from foreign journalists), Zia decided to prove that ‘only a handful of troublemakers’ were involved in the violence. He announced that he would go on a whirlwind tour of Sindh to attest that he was as popular there as he believed he was in the Punjab.

So he took off from Rawalpindi in his big military aircraft (C-130) to Sindh’s capital, Karachi.

Zia’s plane landed at the Karachi International Airport, and from Karachi, he planned to fly to Hyderabad with his posse. With him was also a crew from the state-controlled Pakistan Television (PTV) who was to cover the general’s ‘successful tour of Sindh.’

After arriving in Karachi, Zia briefly talked to a select group of journalists and reiterated his views about the situation in Sindh, insisting all was well, and that the MRD movement was the work of a handful of politicians who were ‘working against Islam, Pakistan and the country’s armed forces.’

He sounded confident about the success of his visit to the troubled spots of Sindh. This confidence was not only generated by what he was hearing from the brownnosers he had gathered around him; but also because by the time he reached Sindh’s second largest city, Hyderabad, he’d already had telephonic conversations with Sindh’s most respected nationalist leader and scholar, GM Syed.

Syed was the main architect of the historical and scholarly narrative behind Sindhi nationalism. After building a radical narrative against the so-called ‘Punjabi ruling elite,’ Syed formed the Jeeay Sindh Tehreek (JST). In 1973, he called for Sindh’s separation from Pakistan. He was promptly jailed by the ZA Bhutto regime.

Ironically, 10 years later when Sindh erupted during the MRD movement in 1983, Syed was nowhere to be seen. He had decided to stay out of the movement, a fact cleverly exploited by Zia.

A staunch opponent of Bhutto and his PPP, Syed, right after Bhutto was hanged in April 1979, was quoted as saying: ‘The (Punjabi) establishment doesn’t realise it has hanged its greatest asset …’

In September 1983, when journalists asked Syed why his party wasn’t taking part in the MRD Movement, he replied: ‘Zia is doing my work. His actions will force the separation of Sindh (from rest of Pakistan). That’s what I want as well. So I’ll let him do it for me.’

In another statement he said: ‘It (the MRD Movement) is a PPP-led movement and it has nothing to do with Sindhi nationalism. PPP is just trying to grab power.’

The decision to ignore the 1983 MRD Movement would eventually cost Syed his political career. Though respected as the Sindhi nation’s greatest scholar till the time of his death in 1996, Syed, however, lost his political clout when a major faction from his Jeeay Sindh Tehreek broke away and joined the movement.

Syed’s logic behind opting not to take any part in the movement seems to be linked to his perception of the PPP as a party that was being used by the ‘Punjabi ruling elite’ to keep nationalist sentiments in Sindh at bay.

This narrative was well known by Syed’s admirers. Yet, what shocked many of them was not really the act of Syed not taking part in a PPP-led movement, but the fact that Syed was actually responding to Zia’s friendly overtures towards him.

Syed’s apologists have suggested that Syed did this to neutralise the PPP’s influence in Sindh so he could construct a Sindhi separatist movement on his own terms.

So Syed sat quietly, watching the MRD movement in Sindh fast becoming a Sindhi nationalist uprising – without him.

By September, the movement had begun to slip away from the hands of the top leadership of the PPP and of other MRD component parties. PPP chairperson, Benazir Bhutto, released a statement from her jail cell urging Punjab to rise if it wanted to save Pakistan from breaking up. She was getting nervous.

The movement was now almost entirely being navigated by the local leaders of PPP’s youth-wing; Maoist outfits such as Awami Tehreek, Qaumi Mahaz-i-Azadi and Mazdoor Kissan Party; left-wing student organizations such as the revamped Democratic Students Federation (DSF), and the breakaway faction of the Jeeay Sindh Tehreek.

Though several rallies were also taken out in Punjab’s capital city, Lahore, the province did not rise the way MRD was expecting it to.

Back in Hyderabad, Zia spoke about the inherent patriotism of all Sindhis. By this, he meant not only indigenous Sindhis, but also the Urdu-speakers (Mohajirs) and the Punjabis settled in the province (called ‘New Sindhis’).

Radical left-wing Sindhi nationalist, Rasool Baksh Palejo, scoffed at Zia’s comment.

Palejo, though not a Syed disciple, echoed Syed’s original narrative about Mohajirs. In the 1960s, Syed had accused the Urdu-speakers of coming to Sindh (as migrants from India), but behaving like those Europeans who had invaded the lands of the ‘Red Indians’ in the Americas and had treated them shabbily.

Palejo’s rebuff did not go down well with the Mohajir members of the various small left-wing parties and youth outfits that were taking part in the movement.

Aamer Zain, a young Urdu-speaking activist of the DSF in the Sindh city of Khairpur, was quoted in a pro-PPP Sindhi newspaper as saying: ‘With all due respect to Palejo Sahib, I am as much a Sindhi as he is, otherwise why would I be risking my student life, future, and everything else by taking part in this movement …?’

On 15th September, Zain was arrested by the police during a violent rally in the Sindh city of Nawabshah and severely tortured. After his release in 1988, he joined the MQM.

In 1983, there was no Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM). The Mohajir majority in Karachi and the Mohajirs in the rest of Sindh were voters and supporters of three main political parties.

The progressive Mohajirs were either associated with the PPP, or with various leftist student outfits such as the NSF. The conservative Mohajirs backed the Jamat-i-Islami (JI) and Jamiat Ulema Pakistan (JUP). After the rise of MQM in 1985, however, the majority of Mohajirs went on to become MQM aficionados. They still are.

But in 1983, there were just two tiny Mohajir nationalist organisations with not much influence. There was also the student outfit, All Pakistan Mohajir Students Organisation (APMSO), but it wasn’t as prominent as it would become after 1985. The Mohajir community largely sat out the MRD movement.

The Sindhi nationalists’ biggest grudge during the MRD movement, however, was with the Punjabi settlers. Sindhi nationalists had been accusing the Zia regime of sending and settling ambitious Punjabi traders and agriculturalists in Sindh to prop up a constituency for himself in the province.

The nationalists claimed that these settlers were taking over Sindhi businesses and jobs and siding with the pro-Zia feudal elite to repress Sindhi nationalism. One of the most prominent among these feudal leaders was Peer Pagaro.

From Hyderabad, Zia began his tour of the troubled interior of the Sindh province. He particularly wanted the cameras to capture his tour of Dadu and Moro, the two cities most affected by the movement. It was decided by his security team that he would use a helicopter to fly there. His aides seemed a tad fidgety and nervous.

The thick forests around Moro and Dadu had become sanctuaries for hundreds of activists escaping Zia’s forces. Another rallying point for the activists were the many big and small shrines of Sufi saints across Sindh.

As Zia sat in the helicopter, waiting to land in Dadu, some of his security advisers shared with him his regime’s latest triumphs in the area: Hundreds of ‘troublemakers and traitors’ had been arrested and eliminated, he was told, and a plan was also afoot to flush out ‘rebels’ hiding in the shrines and the forests.

Most of Sindh’s influential peers (Sufi spiritual leaders) were opposing Zia. They had thrived during the Bhutto regime, especially the powerful Peer of Hala. So Zia contacted another influential Peer, Peer Pagaro (who was a Zia supporter), and requested him to use his influence to make the keepers of the Sufi shrines reject ‘Sindhi rebels’. Pagara tried but failed.

One September evening in 1983, Pakistanis watched a video clip on the state-owned PTV’s 9pm Urdu news bulletin that showed Zia descending from a helicopter and being greeted by a dozen or so smiling men in Sindhi caps. He had reached Dadu.

Viewers were told that Zia was ‘warmly greeted by patriotic Sindhis in Dadu.’

The next day, however, when Pakistanis tuned into BBC Radio’s Urdu service at 8pm, the newscaster, after detailing the nature of the day’s rallies, protest marches and violence in Sindh, also added a brief report about a more amusing episode.

This report became a topic of glee at the Karachi Press Club that was heavily involved in accommodating the journalists who were taking part in the movement.

This is what happened: As Zia’s helicopter landed on a helipad in Dadu, he was greeted by a few men wearing Sindhi caps. He was then escorted towards a bulletproof limousine that was followed by jeeps carrying armed security personnel.

He was expecting the roads of Dadu to be lined up with Sindhis cheering his arrival. In fact, he was sure that his aides had done well to organise a colourful show for the TV cameras to capture.

His motorcade moved into the city on its way to a building where he was expected to speak to the press. To his satisfaction, he did find a sprinkling of people on the roadsides, holding small Pakistani flags. But then, suddenly, his speeding limo swayed to the right, closely avoiding hitting a stray dog that had appeared, as if out of nowhere.

It was no ordinary dog. It had been pushed in front of the general’s motorcade by the same small roadside crowd. On the dog’s body something (in Sindhi) was scribbled with red paint. It read: ‘Zia’

The journalists and the BBC correspondent accompanying the motorcade were not sure what Zia’s reaction to this was.

As the motorcade moved on, a donkey was seen being made to run on the edges of the scruffy Dadu road that Zia’s limo was travelling on. The poor beast was being chased by a group of small kids and on its body too, the red paint screamed Zia’s appellation.

So much for the show of pomp and popularity the President was expecting from his aides.

The general’s limo now gathered even more speed, until it came to a bumpy portion of the road. Here, it slowed down. In front of the limo was a jeep packed with police guards. The jeep came to an abrupt halt and the cops rushed out, brandishing their rifles. What happened?

A middle-aged man, hiding in a tree whose branches hung over this part of the road, had suddenly jumped down from the tree and landed (on his backside) right in front of Zia’s limo.

The man was wearing a traditional Sindhi dress that also included a dhoti (a long piece of cloth wrapped around the waist).

Before the guards could grab him, he lifted his dhoti and exposed his privates, all the while shouting (in Sindhi) ‘Bhali karey aya! Bhali kary aya!’ (Welcome! Welcome!).

He was grabbed, pulled back to one side of the road and beaten up by the guards, as Zia’s limo screeched away.

Nobody quite knows what happened to the gentleman-flasher after he was arrested. But Zia did decide to suddenly end his ‘famous’ tour of Sindh the very next day – terming it a ‘great success.’

A civil war? Not quite
Two factors prevented the movement from turning into a full-scale civil war. First was the calling in of the Pakistan Army, whose prowess was just too overwhelming to challenge by the rather anarchic and disjointed nature of the agitation.

Though the movement had been initiated by an organised alliance of anti-Zia parties, it soon swirled out of the immediate orbit of the alliance’s top leadership and began being steered by the leaders and workers of small Maoist outfits and the student-wings of the parties that were part of the MRD.

By September 1983, the movement did not have anyone piloting it from a central command point, and the violence that followed was largely triggered by spontaneous rallies and agitation organised by anti-Zia groups stationed in various cities and villages of north and central Sindh.

There was hardly any co-ordination between such groups, and no central or joint leaders. Every group followed its own particular party’s local leader who had eventually lost contact with the main MRD leadership, which was either operating from different cities, villages or towns; or had been arrested.

Though the Zia regime saw the movement as a kind of an insurgency, it really wasn’t. The bulk of the agitation constituted protest rallies. Even the rallies that turned violent, the protesters were armed with just stones and bricks.

Episodes of armed violence only took place when the police tried to enter the forests of Moro and Dadu to flush out the activists who had escaped into the woods. And even then, the armed retaliation did not come from the escapees, but by the hardened highway dacoits who already had their bases in these forests. However, over the next few years, many of the escapees were recruited by the dacoits and became notorious highway men.

Secondly, MRD’s senior leadership too prevented the movement from turning into an all-out insurgency. The movement was originally launched to trigger nationwide protests against the regime and force Zia to resign (so fresh elections could follow).

But when the movement mutated and became a radical expression of Sindhi nationalism in Sindh, the main MRD leadership held itself back to reorient the movement (which it did in 1986).

The movement thus fell into the hands of small Maoist and militant Sindhi nationalist groups and localised student-wings of MRD parties. Not everyone was on the same page.

In 1997, an activist of the JUI (the only religious party that was part of the movement), wrote a telling account of what happened to the movement. Though the book (written in Urdu) is largely about his time in various jails of Sindh during the movement, his observations about his jail mates reflect the anarchic nature that the movement eventually took.

He was arrested in 1983 from Karachi and was locked in a tiny jail cell in Hyderabad. He was first accused of being a ‘Soviet agent’, and then of being a member of the clandestine left-wing urban guerrilla outfit, the Al-Zulfiqar.

After realising the absurdity of accusing a member of a right-wing religious party of being a communist, the police booked him for taking part in ‘anti-state activities’. He was constantly tortured, along with the young men who kept being thrown in the same jail.

His jail mates included members of the PPP’s student wing; young Sindhi nationalists; and fiery Maoists. He wrote that though they were taking part in the same movement, they often held onto each other in contempt.

As for the flasher, the most popular theory about him is that he was a peasant in a village near Dadu who had managed to get one of his sons educated.

His son had travelled to Karachi for further studies (at the Karachi University). Here, he first joined the student-wing of the Jeeay Sindh Tehreek and then the progressive student alliance, the United Students Movement (USM).

He was arrested in 1981 after a serious episode of violence between the USM and Jamat-i-Islami’s student-wing, the IJT, erupted at the Karachi University.

He was still in a Karachi jail when his father performed the flasher stunt in September 1983. It is believed that the stunt was the idea of the Dadu chapter of the Maoist Awami Tehreek.

No one knows what happened to the man after he was arrested, but it is believed that his son was released after Zia’s demise in 1988.

Source: The 1983 MRD Movement: The flasher’s version
By NADEEM F. PARACHA — PUBLISHED SEP 24, 2015
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Smokers’ Corner: Waiting for Cooler Saab


Some two months ago while driving over the recently erected Clifton Flyover in Karachi, a good part of which runs past the shrine of Sufi saint Abdullah Shah Ghazi, I thought I saw a malang (spiritual vagabond) whom I once knew.

He was lying on the footpath situated on the right of where the flyover ends. I slowed down the car to take a closer look and indeed it was him, even though he must now be in his 70s. I hadn’t seen him for over 23 years, but remembered well his face and, especially, his name: Khassu.

I pulled the car nearer to the footpath on which he was blissfully taking a nap. I rolled down the car window and shouted, ‘Khassu! Khassu!’

But Khassu just wouldn’t respond. I tried to park my car beside the footpath so I could get down, but a stream of vehicles had begun to pile behind my car, with their drivers honking like their lives depended on using their car horns in the most deranged manner possible.

In this city, there are stories hidden in every street corner
I instinctively turned left towards the centre of the road and drove away. A week or so later, I did go looking for Khassu again but he was nowhere to be found.

Until about 1995, there used to be a block of apartments just behind the Abdullah Shah Ghazi shrine. The apartments were built in the 1960s and had a huge parking lot. Some friends of mine and I often went to play cricket there. This was between the early 1980s and early 1990s.

The apartments began being torn down after 1995 and today a massive building is being constructed on the plot by real estate tycoon, Malik Riaz.

In the late 1980s my friends and I would frequently visit the Shah Ghazi shrine (mostly out of curiosity), especially on Thursday evenings when a concert of qawwali used to be held there. I wonder if they are still held there now, but till the early 1990s, qawwalis were a regular fixture at the shrine every Thursday evening from 10 pm till midnight.

Here is where we first met Khassu. I think it was some time in 1987. We had just entered our 20s. Khassu was there, always in a green flowing kurta, a multicoloured fakir cap, greying stubble and lots of metallic bangles on his wrists.

He never spoke a word, unless he was at the qawwali (which he usually was). As the music and the chanting would start to reach a swirling climax, Khassu would spring to his bare feet and begin a fascinating, anarchic dance (dhamaal); all the while shouting ‘haq, haq, haq Allah!’ After the qawwali he would immediately retreat back into his forlorn usual state.

One day a friend of mine asked another malang what Khassu’s story was. He told us that Khassu was left at the gate of the shrine when he was a child (that must be some time in the late 1950s). He’d been living here ever since.

The malang told us that Khassu was not always this quiet (or sad). Then a most remarkable story followed. He said, ‘Khassu is waiting.’

Waiting for what? ‘For Cooler Saab …’ he replied. He actually meant Colour Saab.

Who was Cooler Saab? From Urdu, the malang suddenly switched to speaking in Punjabi: ‘Cooler Saab was a dear friend (of the vagabonds of the shrine). Especially of Khassu. Khassu still waits for him.’

Where did Cooler Saab go? ‘To his maker, the Almighty,’ the malang told us.

So why was Khassu still waiting for him? ‘Cooler Saab told him he will be back to finish a draaing (drawing) he was making for Khassu,’ the malang explained. ‘But he never came back. We heard he had died. But Khaasu never believed it. He is still waiting for him.’

Over the next few months we discovered that Cooler Saab was none other than one of Pakistan’s foremost painters, Ahmad Parvez. Parvez had passed away in 1979.

Born in Rawalpindi, Parvez began his career as a painter at the Punjab University. A restless soul, he soon moved to London in 1955.

In the late 1960s he returned to Pakistan and moved to Karachi. Across the 1970s he rose to become one of the country’s premier artists and a huge influence on the then thriving art scene of the city.

In spite of being surrounded by admirers, Parvez remained to be a restive and impatient soul, never satisfied.

His lifestyle became increasingly erratic. Nonchalant about being hailed as a genius by art critics in the UK, US and Pakistan and able to sell his work easily, a contemporary noted that Parvez treated money ‘as if he hated it’.

Art critic Salwat Ali in a profile of Parvez (in Dawn) wrote that Parvez ‘was given to rampages and turbulent interactions.’ Deputy Editor of Global Post and art critic, Mariya Karimjee, informs her readers that ‘in the 1970s, Ahmed Parvez, one of the country’s most revered artists, was a frequent visitor to the Abdullah Shah Ghazi shrine, and could often be seen there with a lit blunt (hashish joint) in hand’.

Critics and contemporaries of Parvez suggest that most of the money that he made was spent on alcohol. Sick of the company he was attracting, he began frequenting various Sufi shrines of Karachi. He became a regular visitor at Karachi’s Abdullah Shah Ghazi shrine.

Art critic, Zubaida Agha, in an essay on Ahmed Parvez writes that the more fame Parvez gathered, the more erratic and ‘unhealthy’ his lifestyle became.

By the late 1970s he was almost permanently staying on the grounds of the Abdullah Shah Ghazi shrine. This is when he must have struck a friendship with Khassu.

A Lahore-based artist, Maqbool Ahmed, who was a student at the Lahore College of Arts in the late 1970s, told me how he came to Karachi to meet his idol, Ahmed Parvez, but was shocked at what he saw: ‘This was 1978. Parvez was a mess. He didn’t even acknowledge my praise and presence. He was an extremely troubled man, but no one seemed to understand why this was.’

Maqbool said Parvez could have made millions (of rupees): ‘He did make some money but it seemed he wasn’t interested. He behaved as if he was selling his soul to people who had no clue what his art was all about.’ Maqbool then wondered, ‘perhaps it was this guilt that drove him into the hands of the homeless malangs?’

Even when the government bestowed upon him the prestigious Pride of Performance Award, Parvez continued with his distressed lifestyle. And then it happened. And no one was surprised.

In 1979, he suddenly collapsed and was found dead in a room that he had rented at the now-defunt Bombay Hotel, near I.I. Chundrigar Road in Karachi.)

Lamenting Parvez’s self-imposed isolation and destructive lifestyle, an art critic writing for Dawn in 1979 added that ‘Ahmed Parvez still had another 20 years of genius left in him. But then perhaps, it was this genius that so tragically sealed his fate as well’.

I now know that his friend, Khassu, at the shrine, is still alive. Though he was asleep when I last saw him, it did seem he was still waiting for Cooler Saab. And for that ‘draaing’ he was promised, now 36 years ago.

Source: Smokers’ Corner: Waiting for Cooler Saab
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, September 25th, 2015
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Storming heaven: A revolt in Makkah


The carpenter
In 2010, I met a carpenter named Mateeullah (aka Matee Ghara). 'Ghara' in Urdu means carpenter. Matee at the time seemed to be in his early 70s. He was from my ancestral hometown, Makhad in the Attock District (North Punjab).

Matee was hired as a carpenter by my paternal grandfather in the 1950s and early 1960s to work in the textile factory that he was setting up in Karachi at the time.

Matee Ghara quit the job in the late 1960s when I was born. He remembered me well, even though I had no recollection of him. Matee had quit because he managed to bag a job in Makkah, the Muslim holy city in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

However, I did remember him visiting my grandfather once, sometime in the mid-1980s. But when I mentioned this to him, he actually became sad. Surprised by his reaction, I asked whether I had triggered a memory he’d rather not talk about.

‘No, no, puttar (son) …’ he responded in Punjabi. ‘I’d come to your grandfather to ask him to help me look for my son, Munir.’

I asked him what happened to his son.

‘He was beheaded in Saudi Arabia …!’ He replied, his voice still heavy with grief.

He then added: ‘But at the time (in the early 1980s) I did not know this. The Saudis refused to tell me and the Pakistani Embassy told me they had no clue where my son had vanished. It was only some years later that we found out that he had been executed in Riyadh …’

Matee Ghara, an expert carpenter, had quit his job in Karachi and moved to Makkah with his wife and three young sons. In 1967, he got a job at a fledgling furniture factory in Makkah that was owned by a minor Arab prince and managed by a former Pakistani trader.

Matee was one of the earliest Pakistanis to travel to an oil-rich Arab country for work.

‘There were hardly any Pakistanis in Saudi Arabia when I reached there,’ Matee had told me. ‘That country was still barren and flat with very few tall buildings and roads.’

But all this was about to change. In 1964, when one of the more dynamic sons of the founder of the Saudi monarchy became king, he came in with a vision to transform Saudi Arabia into a powerful political player in the world; an ambition built upon the wealth that the desert kingdom had begun to pile after oil was discovered here in 1938.

That son was Faisal. He had replaced his brother, King Saud, who in turn had ascended to the thrown in 1953 after King Abdulaziz (the founder of the Saud monarchy) had passed away.

Faisal accused his brother Saud of floundering Saudi money and mismanaging the country’s economy. In 1963, he pulled off a quiet palace coup that ousted his brother, and by 1964, he was the new King of Saudi Arabia: King Faisal bin Abdulaziz.

Faisal was perturbed by the fact that even though his kingdom was made up of lands and sites from where Islam had originally emerged (6th century CE), the Muslim world (at the time) was being dominated by men such as the ‘secular’ Egyptian ruler and leader, Gammal Abul Nasser, and by left-leaning ideologies such as Ba’ath Socialism and Arab Nationalism that had glued together socialist concepts with populist nationalism and Islamic symbolism.

That is why Faisal welcomed members of Egypt’s radical Muslim Brotherhood who had either escaped or were expelled from Nasser’s Egypt. Faisal planned to counter Arab Nationalism by promoting his version of ‘Pan-Islamism’ and for this, he was willing to use his kingdom’s oil wealth.

But such plans would take some time to materialise. So, Faisal began to concentrate on his other idea to counter Nasser. He began to ‘modernise’ Saudi Arabia.

He allowed a large number of American and European companies and technicians to set up shop in the kingdom and build for him modern highways, roads, boulevards and buildings.

This move by him was denounced by the powerful ultra-conservative religious figureheads who had been empowered by his father, Abdulaziz, to help the monarchy keep Saudi Arabia ‘on the right path.’

Though American and British technicians and businessmen (especially those related to the oil industry) had often visited Saudi Arabia during Abdulaziz’s time as well, the numbers of westerners visiting and working in Saudi Arabia increased dramatically during the Faisal era.

Faisal was desperate to modernise Saudi Arabia because Nasser in Egypt and secular Arab regimes in Iraq, Syria, Algeria and Tunisia had all described Saudi Arabia as being ‘a regressive feudal/tribal backwater (that was ill-suited to represent the Muslim world in an era of modern thought and progress).’

But Faisal had to be careful about how much he could modernise Saudi Arabia.

His father had constructed a monarchy with the help of insurgents and fighters made up of fanatical Bedouins called the Ikhwan (the brotherhood).

Abdulaziz had used the Ikhwan to defeat rival tribes and finally the Jordanian Hashmite ruler of Makkah in 1926 to become king of a land renamed Saudi Arabia (after the Saud tribe that Abdulaziz belonged to).

The Ikhwan were followers of a particularly strict and puritanical strand of Islam that some call ‘Wahabism.’ In the 1930s when oil was discovered in the land and Abdulaziz began receiving Western businessmen and technicians, the Ikhwan accused him of betraying their trust and of ‘dealing with the devil.’

Abdulaziz tried to appease the Ikhwan by insisting that Saudi Arabia was to be an entirely ‘Islamic abode’ with strict Sharia laws and that for Saudi Arabia’s new-found oil wealth to be managed well, he needed western expertise and personnel.

But the Ikhwan were unmoved. They threatened to break away from the orbit of the Abdulaziz monarchy and attack the westerners ‘polluting the holy land.’

Abdulziz was alarmed by the reaction and asked British warplanes stationed in Iraq to bomb Ikhwan strongholds near the Saudi-Iraq border.

Hundreds were killed in the bombing, triggering an all-out revolt by the Ikhwan against the monarchy. Then, Saudi troops and the Ikhwan came face-to-face in a decisive battle around the oasis of Nejdi. Saudi troops armed with latest British weapons, mercilessly cut down the Ikhwan and crushed the rebellion.

The few Ikhwan members who managed to survive the rout were allowed to lead quiet lives in the desert. One such man was Mohammad bin Seif. In the 1920s, he had been a commander in Abdulaziz’s Ikhwan troops who had helped him grab power.

Seven years after the Ikhwan defeat at the hands of the Saudi army, Seif got married and was blessed with a son. He named him Juhayman.

The son
After crushing the Ikhwan, Abdulaziz allowed the formation of a powerful group of clerics who would advise the monarchy on implementing Islamic laws but were not permitted to ever criticise the monarchy. The group was led by a blind cleric called Bin Baz.

In the 1940s, Bin Baz expressed his concern about how the holy land was being allowed to receive ‘infidels’ (westerners). He was promptly arrested and jailed. But he was soon released and, ironically, made the regime’s official religious figurehead after he agreed not to criticise the monarchy.

He was, however, allowed (and even encouraged) to deliver fiery sermons in the grand mosque of Makkah against ‘communists’, whom he believed had ‘infiltrated and taken over the minds of the Muslims in other Arab countries’. He also often raged against ‘the obscenities of modernity’ that were never to be allowed to enter the holy land.

So when Faisal began his modernisation project, the powerful Bin Baz was not amused. Faisal largely ignored Bin Baz as long as he didn’t pose any direct threat to the Saudi monarchy.

Matee Ghara remembered visiting the grand mosque in the late 1960s and hearing Bin Baz speak. He told me: ‘Baz was not very happy with Faisal. He never attacked him directly, but kept saying that the holy land was being turned into a playground of the devil.’

Matee continued: ‘In the next few years (i.e. by the early 1970s), Saudi cities began to change and grow. More and more foreigners (including South Asians and Africans) started to arrive (for work), and brand new roads and buildings emerged. The number of people visiting Makkah to perform Hajj also doubled.’

Matee added: ‘Faisal was very popular among most the Saudis, especially young Saudis. But we, Pakistanis, and people from other poor Muslim countries who had settled in Saudi Arabia also loved him dearly. He was creating new jobs and my three sons got a good education in an Iranian school, even though we were Sunnis. But in those days, Iran was under the Shah and Iranian schools only taught non-religious subjects. There was no Pakistani school in Saudi Arabia in those days.’

In 1973, when Matee’s oldest son Munir turned 16, his mother implored him to get his religious education from a Pakistani Islamic evangelist. The evangelist had been invited by the Saudi regime to set up a religious school for South Asian Muslims in Makkah.

Of course, the idea was to impart the Saudi version of the faith to the children of Pakistani and Indian Muslim families working in Saudi Arabia.

‘Munir began attending this school (in 1973),’ Matee informed me. ‘But slowly, he began to question the way we had been practicing our faith. He told us that Pakistanis didn’t know anything about Islam and were committing sin after sin. I was doing well and my family was now settled, so I just thanked the Almighty (Rab) and ignored Munir.

‘But I became angry when one day, he insisted that his younger brothers be taken out from the Iranian school. I asked him where else will they study. They were not allowed to go to Saudi schools and anyway, they didn’t know how to speak or understand Arabic. At least the Iranian school was mostly teaching them in English. The western schools set up by European and American ex-pats were too expensive. Munir said they (his brother) didn’t need to learn nonsense like history and science and told me to put them with him in the school that he had begun to attend (on his mother’s insistence). He said religious studies are all a person needs. The tension between him and me became so strenuous over this issue that I pulled my other sons out of the Iranian school and sent them back to Pakistan to live with their grandparents in our ancestral village. There they went to a government school for a while, but dropped out and became petty farmers. I destroyed their future …’

The school
Saudi Arabia enjoyed a windfall of profits when it increased oil prices after the 1973 Egypt-Israel War. Nasser in Egypt had passed away in 1970 and his successor, Anwar Sadat, enjoyed a sudden burst of popularity when Egyptian and Syrian forces managed to achieve some major victories against Israeli forces with Soviet-made jets and artillery.

However, the United States quickly reinforced Israeli forces and they rebounded by pushing back the combined Egyptian-Syrian armies.

This was Faisal’s moment to strike and emerge as the Muslim world’s top leader. He stopped oil supplies to the US and other European countries supporting Israel. The US economy, heavily dependent on Saudi oil, began to buckle.

The US was thus forced to ask Israeli forces to fall back. Faisal slowed down oil production and tripled the price of oil, enjoying massive profits from developed nations desperate for his oil.

Watching Faisal emerge as a hero (and now loaded with a windfall of ‘Petro-Dollars’), Sadat began to warm up to him. Faisal promised to reconstruct Egyptian economy but only if Sadat would let go of ‘Nasserism.’ Almost immediately, Sadat expelled Soviet military and technical advisors from Egypt and broke away from the Soviet camp. On Faisal’s instructions, he also allowed the expelled members of the Muslim Brotherhood to return to Egypt.

Matee remembered all this: ‘Munir came one day and told us he was going to Cairo with some friends. Much later, we found out that the friends all belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood. Some of them were his teachers in the school. They were recruiting Pakistanis to set up Muslim Brotherhood branches in Pakistan. But those who tried were arrested by the Bhutto regime.

‘Munir said Bhutto was playing a double game. On the one hand (like Sadat), he had come under the influence of Faisal, while on the other hand (unlike Sadat), he wasn’t allowing pro-Saudi organisations like the Muslim Brotherhood to operate in Pakistan. Munir was very angry. He said Bhutto was willing to allow Palestinian outfits like the PLO to open offices in Pakistan. They (the PLO) were not true Muslims, Munir would complain. But when he returned to Saudi Arabia after his trip to Cairo, Munir said Sadat was not sincere…’

But this didn’t mean Munir was a fan of King Faisal. Matee told me that (according to Munir), Faisal was throwing around money to make his regime politically influential in the Muslim world, but doing nothing for religion: ‘I started to become very concerned about Munir,’ Matee said.

He added: ‘At the school, Munir was learning no skills, nothing except a mixture of some form of our faith and some brand of politics,’ Matee remembered.

‘I asked him what he wanted to do, and how he will support himself and his future wife and children. But he just didn’t care and kept saying he only wanted to serve his faith. My wife was very religious, but she was amused when her teenage son began to tell her the correct way of saying her prayers. He also told us not to indulge in indecencies like watching TV, listening to the radio and all.

‘I got really sick of it and told him there was not much happening in Saudi Arabia anyway. TV just had Bin Baz lectures and the radio was all in Arabic. And I shouted at him for calling us indecent. He was unmoved and kept at it until one day I went to his school and told the principal (an Egyptian), that I wanted to pull out my son from the school. Two days later, I was visited by two Pakistanis and a Bangladeshi and warned that my action of pulling out my son would be seen as a rebellious act against the Saudi regime. They asked me to be grateful that my son was being put on the correct path. Then another two days later, a hefty Saudi man came and, in broken Urdu, told me to let my son be and never admonish him. I was stunned. I didn’t know who this Saudi was.’

In 1975, Faisal was assassinated. According to the official version, he was killed by a ‘deranged’ young cousin of a man who had been shot dead by Saudi police during a riot in 1965. The riots had started in Riyadh by the followers of Bin Baz when Faisal had launched Saudi Arabia’s first TV station.

However, conspiracy theorists suggested (and they still do) that Faisal was murdered by the American CIA because the US government was simmering after the way Faisal had used the power of oil to browbeat the West during the 1973 Arab-Israel War.

‘There was great sadness all over,’ Matee remembers. ‘He (Faisal) was such a great man. Had he lived, Saudi Arabia would be so different. Pakistanis were treated in the friendliest manner during his rule. We were treated very badly after he passed away.’

How did Munir react, I asked him.

‘By then (1975), we hardly saw him. One day he came home and said that Faisal had destroyed Saudi Arabia. He said he had made it corrupt and unholy. But what perturbed me most was when he said that now the holy land will be cleansed from all corruption. I asked, did he mean the new king, Khalid (Faisal’s brother). He just scoffed at me and said that the cleansing can’t be done by a king, but by a pious man chosen by God …’

The cleric and the other son

Juhayman, the son of the defeated Ikhwan fighter, was born in the late 1930s. He lived with his parents as a Bedouin in the desert. He was never formally educated but did receive some religious education. He grew up hearing stories of how the Ikhwan had laid down their lives to bring the Saud family to power and then how they were wiped out by the same family.

Juhayman joined the Guardsman as a truck driver. The Guardsmen was a small government force positioned in the Kingdom’s far-flung and less developed areas. On the side, Juhayman ran a tiny clandestine business, smuggling in cigarettes (on camels) from Kuwait.

In 1973, he quit the Guardsmen and came to Medina, where he lived in a small rundown apartment. He began to regularly visit the Islamic University in Medina, where Bin Baz would often deliver his fiery sermons. By now, he had become the most influential cleric in the Kingdom, though he was still on the payroll of the monarchy.

During the Faisal regime, Baz would only indirectly criticise Faisal’s modernisation project. But when Khalid took over as King, his younger brother, Crown Prince Fahad, put even more wheels on the project that Faisal had started, and initiated the emergence of shopping malls in Makkah and Medina and American soap operas on Saudi TV.

Fahad also gathered a reputation of being a ‘playboy prince’.

Baz was livid. In his lectures at the Islamic University, he began to directly attack Khalid and Fahad. He went to the extent of asking the government to ban cigarettes and even clapping in public!

Faisal had allowed Saudi women to work in offices. Khalid accelerated this policy leaving Baz complaining that ‘this act (of allowing women to work) was inspired by Satan.’

But since most of Baz’s audiences (at the University) was made up of exiled Muslims from other countries and a few disaffected Saudis (like Juhayman), Khalid did not take any action against him.

In 1976, Baz decided to form a missionary organisation that pledged to halt the wave of ‘abominations’ being introduced by the monarchy, and to reinstate the ‘true faith of the Saudis in the holy land.’

The outfit was called Dawa Salafiya and it began to recruit and send missionaries across the Kingdom. Juayman became one such missionary. He rose quickly through the ranks of the outfit.

By 1978, the Dawa had become a powerful missionary outfit, headed by Baz, and having in its ranks thousands of Saudis. But it also included Yemenis, Pakistanis, Muslim Indians, Bangladeshis, Sudanese, Somalis, Egyptians and even a few black American Muslim converts.

Matee told me: ‘Years later we discovered that Munir too had joined Baz’s organisation. It (the organisation) was recruiting common Saudis and young non-Saudi Muslims working in Saudi Arabia, but they also began visiting religious schools like the one attended by my son; and (with the help of the school’s administration), the organisation began to attract educated young men like Munir. We hardly saw him anymore. We had no clue what he was up to. It was as if he had begun to hate us.’

In 1977, Juhayman had a falling out with the Dawa. He criticised Baz for continuing to be on the payroll of the monarchy. Baz explained to him that the monarchy might be corrupt and the princes may be playboys, but the monarchy remained to be a barrier against communism and secularism in the region.

Juhayman scoffed at this explanation and quit the organisation. With him also went some other members of the organisation, one of them being Munir.

‘Munir never spoke of Juhayman,’ Matee told me. ‘He would just talk about some pious Saudi hero who would cleanse the holy land. It was only latter that we realised that he was talking about Juhayman.

Juhayman now began to write and publish long essays against the ‘corruption of the monarchy,’ the sacrilege of the holy land by Saudi princes, and ‘their infidel guests,’ and also about how clerics like Baz were not practicing what they were preaching.

Juhayman soon came under the radar of the Saudi police, especially when he began to talk to the members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (settled in Saudi Arabia) about how they planned to topple Sadat. Most of Juhayman’s followers were young Saudis who had come from poor Bedouin families. They had arrived in the Kingdom’s big cities to benefit from the rapid pace of economic modernisation, but had been left feeling alienated and disorientated.

Others came from working-class groups of non-Saudi Muslims from various South Asian and African countries.

In late 1977, Juhayman formed a clandestine organisation. He told his followers to shun all material luxuries. The members also let their hair and beards grow, and walked around in dusty white robes preaching ‘the true word of God.’

They destroyed their identity cards and formed communes in Makkah, Medina and Riyadh, where they lived, ate and prayed together.

The Saudi government finally acted and arrested some members of Juhayman’s group. But Bin Baz came to their rescue and ordered their release. The Saudi regime obliged.

Then, in November 1978, the brother of one of Juhayman’s closest aids, Mohammed Abdullah al-Qahtanithat, began to allude that his brother was the Mehdi (the mythical warrior-savior who according to some non-Quranic Islamic traditions would appear to spread God’s laws on Earth).

Juhayman went along with the façade. It was helpful to his cause. It gave his movement a messianic sheen. Juhayman began to tell his followers to prepare for a showdown with the unholy forces of tyranny, obscenity and greed.

The group began to amass weapons. The weapons were first stolen from the armories of the Guardsmen by Juhayman’s followers in the official paramilitary outfit.

Then more rifles and machine guns were smuggled in from Yemen. Bombs and even more guns were bought from the black market that was then packed with weaponry smuggled in from Lebanon, a country that (since 1975) had collapsed into a lethal civil war.

In late 1978, Juhayman quoted an obscure hadith foretelling the arrival of the Mehdi who would fight anti-Islam forces from the Grand Mosque in Makkah. The Mosque was located at the site of the most sacred Islamic site, the Ka'aba.

The storming
On November 29, 1979, as the grand mufti of the mosque was preparing to lead the morning prayers that were being attended by thousands of Muslims from across the world, Juhayman led some 500 of his followers, all heavily armed, into the mosque and seized it.

His followers who entered the mosque also included a dozen or so veiled women who had joined his movement. Juhayman cut off the telephone lines, allowed many worshippers to leave the mosque, but retained hundreds as hostages.

He put expert marksmen on the roofs who then easily repulsed the Saudi regime’s first attempt to take back the mosque. Dozens of Saudi policemen and troops were cut down by heavy machine gun fire from Juhayman’s men.

Matee was in Riyadh at the time. He told me: ‘I was in Riyadh for some work. My wife called at a relative’s apartment where I was staying. She told him she could see black smoke rising from the Ka'aba. But then the line got disconnected and my relative just couldn’t call her back. The phone lines went dead.

‘Then we began to hear murmurings about an attack on Ka'aba. I was scared. Nobody was saying a word about it on the TV or the radio. I hurried back to Makkah on a taxi driven by a Pakistani. He told me the airports were being shut down. When I reached home the next day, indeed, I too could see black smoke rising from the site of the mosque and the Ka'aba from my apartment window. Then police vans appeared and began announcing that everyone should remain indoors. I panicked. I thought of Munir. I knew he prayed regularly at the mosque. My wife begged me to fetch him. I ran down and headed towards the school. It was sealed and being guarded by Saudi soldiers. One officer told me to go back because there was no one there. I began to shout, ‘Munir, Munir! The soldiers started to push me inside a waiting army truck, but I dodged them and ran back home …’

The Saudi regime summoned its leading religious figurehead, Bin Baz, and other official clerics to issue a fatwa against the attackers, which they did. With a fatwa in hand (sanctioning Saudi soldiers to enter the holy premises with weapons), troops moved again to retake the mosque.

But once again, they were repulsed with machinegun fire, grenades and missiles. Dozens more lay dead. The Saudi regime began to panic. It blacked-out all news coming out from the besieged kingdom.

Mateen told me: ‘For days the whole country just stood still. The TV and radio went blank. We couldn’t even tune into the BBC (radio). Phones were dead. All we heard was gunfire. Nobody spoke. Nobody was allowed to speak.

‘But one day, our phone suddenly rang. The operator said the call was from Pakistan. It was my mother. The phones were back on. She asked us what was happening. We told her we had no clue. She said that the American Embassy in Islamabad had been burned down. I was shocked. Was it the Americans attacking Ka'aba? The phones went dead again.’

Pakistan’s state-owned TV channel the PTV was telecasting a cricket Test match between Pakistan and India being played in the Indian city of Bangalore on the day of the siege. The transmission was suddenly interrupted and the newscaster, Azhar Lodhi, appeared on screen.

In a dead sombre tone, he announced the attack on Ka'aba without giving any details about the attackers. PTV did not return to the Test match; instead it started to run na'ats and recitations from the Quran.

PTV had the details of the attack, but on the advice of the military regime (that had come to power in July 1977), it did not announce that the attackers were all Muslim.

Pakistanis tuned into BBC Radio’s Urdu service that quoted the official Iranian media that was now under the control of an Islamic revolutionary government in Tehran. The reported quote suggested that the attacks were the work of the ‘American-Zionist lobby.’

The very next day, large rallies condemning the siege appeared in major Pakistani cities. The biggest rally took place in the country’s capital, Islamabad.

It was a spontaneous gathering held outside the American embassy building. It suddenly turned violent when some students made fiery speeches, blaming the United States for the attack on the Ka'aba.

The gathering soon turned into a rampaging mob and forced its way inside the embassy’s compound and offices. The mob was acting upon what it had heard on BBC believing that the Iranian quote that the radio network had quoted was actual news.

The Iranians were well aware of the reality behind the takeover of the mosque by Saudi fanatics. But they used the opportunity to embarrass both the Americans and the Saudi monarchy by claiming that it was a part of a US plot to ‘occupy’ Makkah.

The Zia regime, unimpressed by American criticism of its takeover (in 1977) and facing American sanctions, did absolutely nothing to reveal the details of the attack.

Suddenly, unchecked by the Zia regime, the news broadcast by Iranian radio that was then reproduced by some Urdu newspapers in Pakistan was used as a plank to organise a sit-in outside the US embassy in Islamabad.

The sit-in was then infiltrated by some boisterous young men who instigated the gathered people to attack the embassy. The mob surged forward towards the embassy, setting it on fire. The attack lasted for hours, but the police stayed put.

Pakistan Army helicopters hovered over the burning building and only landed on the roof of the crumbling structure after the mob had already killed two American and two Pakistani employees of the embassy. Two protesters also lost their lives in the chaos.

The violence and the rallies finally came to a sudden end once the military regime decided to release the full details of the attack in Makkah.

After three more raids by Saudi forces were again repulsed by Juhayman’s men, the Saudi regime contacted the French for help. The Saudis had earlier declined Jordanian and Pakistani offers to use their armies to enter the mosque.

The French sent three senior commandos of the French army to oversee a plan to break the sigh. Saudi troops, now working under the instructions of the French military experts, tried again.

After days of intense fighting, Saudi troops finally managed to break in. Over 255 people died. This included dozens of pilgrims who were being held inside the mosque as hostages. Over 500 were injured. 127 Saudi soldiers were killed.

Though most of Juayman’s men were also killed, Juayman and about 67 of his followers who survived the counterattack were arrested. In January 1980, they were all beheaded.

Surprisingly, instead of cracking down on anarchic religious outfits, King Khalid did what his father Abdulaziz had done after crushing the Ikhwan. Khalid, too, further empowered the Kingdom’s official hardline clergy. The idea was that it would absorb (and neutralise) any fanatical outbursts against the monarchy.

But in the coming years, this policy would once again backfire when it failed to halt the emergence of extremist outfits generated by the Saudi monarchy’s curious mixture of officially peddling a puritanical strand of the faith, its appeasement of those who proliferate this strand and its desire to achieve rapid economic modernisation without implementing any social and political reform.

Out of the 500 or so Juhayman’s men who had seized the mosque, more than 70 per cent were Saudi men. The rest belonged to countries such as Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Egypt, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. There were a few African American converts as well, all of whom died in the fighting.

Matee never believed his son was involved, until he was finally informed (three years after the attack) that Munir had been arrested and beheaded:

‘When the dust settled, I went looking for Munir again. After months, the Saudis released the list of those killed in the attack. Munir’s name was not on the dead pilgrims’ list. But the Saudis never fully released the names of the militants who were killed inside the mosque or were beheaded by the government. Munir was nowhere. I pleaded with the Pakistani Embassy in Riyadh and then the Pakistan government to help me find my son, but they said they had no information about him. It was only in 1984 that the Embassy confirmed that Munir had been beheaded …’

Matee returned to Pakistan in 1985.

According to what Matee found out, Munir had been introduced to Juhayman’s group by an Egyptian teacher of his at the school. The teacher had been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and had arrived in Saudi Arabia as an exile in the 1960s. He quit the Brotherhood in the late 1970s and became a recruiter for Juhayman. He convinced Munir to join Juayman’s cause. Minir gladly went along.

Matee Ghara had told me:

‘I don’t know what role Munir played in all this. My wife kept waiting for him and broke down when we finally came to know about his fate. She said, 'Janat toh maa kay pair talay hoti hey (Heaven is beneath a mother’s feet); what was my son doing looking for it in the ways of a mad man?'’

She passed away in 1994, still hoping that one day her Munir may just come back to her. He didn’t.

Source: Storming heaven: A revolt in Makkah
By Nadeem F. Paracha — Published Oct 1, 2015
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Smokers’ Corner: Catching 22

To Imran Khan’s PTI, the 2013 election in NA122 and NA154 (along with two others), symbolise how the said election across the country (and especially in the Punjab) was ‘stolen’ by PML-N.

In August this year the Punjab Election Commission had ordered re-polling in NA122 and NA154, declaring the election in these constituencies null and void after accepting Imran Khan’s petition challenging the 2013 election result.

Though the Commission did not entertain Khan’s allegations of the election being stolen through ‘massive rigging’, it did maintain that certain irregularities (mainly by the polling staff), did occur.

Nevertheless, Khan and his PTI received the verdict with much pomp and jubilation, claiming that it substantiated Khan’s rigging claims; whereas the PML-N criticised the ruling by inquiring how a contestant could be unseated if no evidence of rigging was found (by the Commission) against the contestant.

This was the main argument presented (in the Supreme Court) by the lawyers of one such contestant who had defeated a strong PTI candidate, Jehangir Tareen, in NA154 (in 2013).

Punjab’s two National Assembly seats are central to the on-going conflict between the PML-N and PTI
Consequently, on Sept 29 this year, the Supreme Court suspended the August decision of the election tribunal to de-seat the PML-N candidate.

This has left Lahore’s NA122 to become the main arena that can provide the important constituency’s verdict on PTI’s persistent claims of rigging by the PML-N and the latter’s insistence that it won the 2013 election fair and square.

The 2013 election resulted in the ouster of the ‘left-liberal’ coalition government of the PPP, the ANP and the MQM (who had triumphed in the 2008 election). In 2013, PML-N achieved a landslide victory in the centre and in the country’s largest province, the Punjab.

PTI, whose stature had risen rather dramatically in 2011, was expected to win big in 2013, but it only managed to bag 28 seats.

The debacle left PTI chief, Imran Khan, accusing PML-N along with the temporary caretaker administration in the Punjab, the Election Commission, a private TV channel and even the former Chief Justice of working together to guarantee a PML-N victory.

Interestingly, though Khan has continued to reiterate his claims, his party, the PTI, has lost the majority of the by-elections (especially against the PML-N) that have taken place after the main 2013 election.

Nevertheless, if PTI manages to win NA122 (from which Imran Khan himself had lost to PML-N’s Ayaz Sadiq in 2013), this one victory just might be enough to give Khan the kind of momentum he is seeking to dislodge the PML-N regime.

The contest is an interesting one also because it is between two centre-right parties. The PML-N today is considered to be more customary in nature. It has evolved from being an implosive rightist entity (in the 1990s) to becoming a well-oiled moderate centre-right electoral machine. PTI on the other hand has emerged to challenge PML-N’s long-held electoral hegemony in the populous Punjab province. It has done so as a more radical version of centre-right politics, mixing populist right-wing rhetoric with equally populist leftist symbolism and social-democratic allusions.

The Punjab today is considered to be one of the country’s most conservative provinces, especially after former military dictator, General Ziaul Haq (1977-88), began to change the ideological complexion of the province through economic policies designed to benefit Punjab’s urban and semi-urban business communities, trader classes, and large sections of the province’s bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeois.

So, the recent parallel rise of PTI here is mainly due to the more radical and effusive form of conservatism that it is offering. Though it has not quite been able to dent the PML-N vote bank in the Punjab, it has certainly usurped the support that the left-liberal PPP once enjoyed in this province. The PPP too had fused leftist symbolism with right-wing populism in the Punjab.

The electoral history of NA122 may be an effective way to understand how Punjab’s electoral politics have evolved. The constituency is one of the 13 NA seats in Punjab’s capital city, Lahore. It was introduced during the 2002 election and was largely carved out from what used to be NA94 and NA95.

This area has a large lower-middle-class (petty-bourgeoisie) population, but also contains large sections populated by well-to-do middle-class Lahorites. It also has Imran Khan’s residence, making this his home constituency.

During the historic 1970 election (the first in the country based on adult franchise), much of what today constitutes NA122 was NW61/Lahore 4 and NW62/Lahore 5. The NW61 seat was won by PPP’s S. Mohammad Rashid who gained 68,721 votes. Rashid was a left-wing ideologue of the PPP. The NW62 seat was bagged by another PPP ideologue, Malik Miraj Khalid (89,660 votes).

In the 1977 election (whose results were annulled by the Zia dictatorship), much of the area came under NA85 which was won by the PPP’s, Mian Salahuddin, a popular patron of the arts, who bagged 50,807 votes.

During the 1988 election (the first after the demise of the Zia dictatorship), the area which today is NA122 became NA94 and NA95 (Lahore 3 and 4). The NA94 seat was won by the then chairperson of the PPP, Benazir Bhutto (53,425 votes), and NA95 was grabbed by the current chief of the PML-N, Mian Nawaz Sharif (49,318 votes).

In the controversial 1990 election, NA94 was won by Mian Umar Hayat (of the Nawaz-led Islami Jamhoori Intihad [IJI]), and NA95 by IJI’s Mian Nawaz Sharif.

In the 1993 election, NA94 was won by PML-N’s Abdul Waheed (52,308) who defeated PPP’s Salman Taseer (47,283). NA95 was won by PML-N’s Nawaz Sharif (57,959).

PML-N’s Tariq Aziz (the famous TV quiz show host), won NA94 during the 1997 election, and Nawaz Sharif once again won NA95. In his first ever election, PTI chief Imran Khan could only receive 5,365 votes (NA95).

During the 2002 election NA94 and 95 were combined to become NA122 (Lahore 5). In this election, the constituency was won by PML-N’s Ayaz Sadiq (37,531). Imran Khan received 18,638 votes.

In the 2008 election, Sadiq won the seat again with 79,506 votes. However, during the 2013 election, he faced a stiff challenge from Imran Khan. Ayaz bagged 93,362 votes whereas Khan received 84,417 votes.

Apart from the economic reasons mentioned earlier suggesting that (during and after the Zia era) these reasons began to initiate a shift in Lahore’s electoral politics from left to right, another reason for this alteration may also be the fact that a large section of the population in Lahore is not entirely native any more.

Ever since the 1980s many areas of the city have seen the erosion of the city’s homegrown population. It has been replaced by a large settler population that has migrated to Lahore from smaller cities around it.

Across the 1990s, these ‘new Lahorites’ were well facilitated by the PML-N and thus constitute the party’s main vote bank here. Indeed, portions of this population’s second generation may be overriding its parents’ preference for PML-N by being attracted to Khan’s PTI, but the bulk of PTI’s recent increase in its vote-bank in Lahore is coming from Lahore’s traditional PPP voters and, more so, from these voters’ children, now grown up.

A recent Gallup-Pakistan survey suggests that the majority of NA122’s constituents will most probably be voting for PML-N again in the scheduled by-election.

Source: Smokers’ Corner: Catching 22
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, October 4th, 2015
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Default October 9, 2015

Aziz Mian: The Nietzschean Qawaal


The annihilated
Many of his concerts usually fell apart and turned into drunken brawls. Aziz Mian would purposely work up the audience towards a state in which many in the crowd ended up losing all sense of order and control.

He would often explain this as being a state of mind from where the brawling men could be hurled into the next state; a state from where they could leap to strike a direct spiritual connection with the Almighty.

A journalist reviewing one such Aziz Mian concert in Karachi in 1975 (for Dawn Magazine) described him as ‘the Nietzschean qawaal!’

By the late 1970s, Aziz Mian had risen to become an iconic qawaal in Pakistan. More so an iconoclast qawaal rather, because of the way he often shattered various long-held traditions of the Qawaali music genre. In the process, he developed and honed a style that was uniquely his own.

Qawaali in South Asia was inspired by devotional music of Sufi orders of Persia and Turkey in which the beauty and power of the Almighty and his creations were sung to the tune of hypnotic and repetitive music and whirling dances.

The genre came to be known as Qawaali when, from the 12th century onwards, it came into contact with the classical music traditions of South Asia and the devotional music of the dominant religions found in the region.

Here, it adopted the many musical instruments developed by Amir Khusro, the brilliant 13th century musician and poet in the courts of India’s Muslim Delhi Sultanate (12th-15th century CE).

In Persia and Turkey, it had a tradition of being restricted to expressing the inner workings of Sufi orders, but by the 16th century (in South Asia), Qawaali also began to reflect the emotional and devotional dynamics of the populist culture and milieu that had begun to develop around the cults of living Sufi saints, and more so, around the shrines of the saints who had passed away.

These shrines, that today can be found across both India and Pakistan, were (and still are) visited not only by the region’s Muslims, but also by Hindus and Sikhs.

There was a history of conflict between Sufism and the more orthodox strands of Islam in which Sufis rejected the strict ritual and doctrinal regimentation of orthodoxy, accusing it of divorcing faith from its spiritual core and soul.

The orthodox ulema retaliated by condemning Sufism for introducing ritualistic and philosophical innovations (biddat) in the faith.

They also scorned at the culture that began to develop around Sufi shrines in which common peasants and homeless men and women indulged in music and drugs.

The Sufis responded by suggesting that the shrines were the only places in the realm where men and women of all creeds, castes and classes were welcome, and where the poor could find some food and shelter.

Muslim empires of the region, from the Delhi Sultanate to the Mughal Empire, employed a number of Islamic scholars and ulema. But knowing well the influence and the popularity that Sufi saints enjoyed among the masses, the Sultans and Emperors were more inclined towards favouring the saints.

However, not all Sufi orders were always entirely copious, pluralistic and accommodating.

Nevertheless, the popular memory in this context is still more about Sufi saints who had abandoned the world of material well-being and power politics, and isolated themselves to acquire a unique spiritual link with the Almighty.

Thoughts of most ancient Sufis reach us through the poetry that they wrote and then composed with the help of certain ragas. This points to the fact that these Sufis were mostly poet-musicians.

Some of their thoughts are clearly subversive and anti-establishment.

Many of them claimed to have had a special spiritual connection with God. It is often believed (by their devotees) that they struck such a link by roaming among the masses and then after transcending regimented religious rituals, they retreated inwards to touch those parts of their mind and heart that were not so well known or explored.

From here, they claimed, they could actually experience the presence of the Almighty – a presence whose power and beauty may render a mortal man senseless, and annihilate his ego, but also (or thus) make him one with his creator.

The annihilation process in this context (fana) was the price the saints were willing to pay and often (in their poetry) described the procedure as passion-play demonstrated by a lover willing to annihilate his lesser self to be close to his elusive, pristine beloved.

Sufi musical and literary genres (such as the Qawaali) are abundant with such narratives. This narrative, when it became a centerpiece of Qawaali, also suggests that after transcending conventional religious ritualism, the faculty used by Sufi saints to make that ultimate link with the Almighty was about an ‘inner spiritual knowledge’ heightened by beautiful poetry sung to the tune of passionate music.

According to the same narrative, the Sufis who had made that link, seemed intoxicated by their distinct, all-encompassing love of the Almighty; like a man drunk on wine and (thus) unhindered by the inhibitions imposed by those who limit a man’s potential to fully realize the spiritual and intellectual faculties that the Almighty has bestowed upon him.

This is another aspect of the Sufi narrative that the Qawaali enthusiastically embraces. But this aspect of the Qawaali purposely and teasingly remains ambiguous.

For example, a verse of such a Qawaali that directly praises the consumption of wine, is then followed by a verse that treats the act of this consumption (and its effects) as a metaphor of an uninhibited love for the Almighty.

Spirits in the material world
The Qawaali remained to be a popular musical genre with the masses in South Asia, but its first real manifestation as a modern and commercially viable art-form emerged in Pakistan in the 1970s.

Its popularity in this respect was squarely based on the rise of two qawaals: Aziz Mian and the Sabri Brothers.

These two not only aroused a keen interest in Qawaali across the classes, but also became two of the most commercially successful qawaals, whose exploits were later matched by the mighty Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in the 1990s.

Their greatest achievement was to ignite a passion for Qawaali among urban audiences who had largely abandoned the traditional Farsi (Persian) Qawaali of the Muslim imperial courts, and the Punjabi Qawaali of Sufi shrines in rural and semi-rural areas of the Punjab province.

In this regard, what Aziz Mian and the Sabri Brothers also did was to fully form Qawaali sung in Urdu – Pakistan’s national language.

Qawaali was already a popular music genre in rural Punjab. It was mainly performed at Sufi shrines. Moving ahead, the Sabri Brothers and Aziz Mian created an urban audience for Qawaali. The audience they appealed to belonged to the metropolitan middle and lower-middle-classes.

The first to experiment with the idea were the Sabri Brothers, led by Ghulam Farid Sabri and Maqbool Ahmed Sabri. They recorded Mera Koi Nahi Hai Terey Siwa (‘I have no one but you’) for EMI-Pakistan in 1958.

Sung in Urdu, the qawaali is an intense ode to the Almighty. The qawaali was an instant hit and was received well by urbanites who were reintroduced to a genre of South Asian music that (over the decades) they had been largely divorced from.

At the time of the release of the Sabri Brothers’ first famous Urdu qawaali, Aziz Mian was a 16-year-old school boy with the knack for always getting into trouble and indulging in acts of petty vandalism and brawling. His family had moved to Pakistan from the Indian city of Meerut after the creation of the country in August 1947.

He came from a musical family and was already learning eastern classical music when he arrived in Pakistan with his family. Whereas the Sabri Brothers had settled in Karachi, Aziz Mian’s family lay its new roots in Lahore.

Aziz Mian’s parents became regular visitors to the city’s famous shrine of Sufi saint, Data Ganj Baksh, and Aziz Mian would often accompany them.

But Aziz Mian had a troubled youth. At an early age, he had begun to drink and smoke and became hooked on chewing tobacco-laced paans (beetle leaf). He would also often get into trouble for committing acts of vandalism and hooliganism as a teen.

Worried by his behaviour, his father encouraged him to learn Qawaali from a group of established qawaals who regularly performed Punjabi qawaalis at the Data shrine. Aziz Mian agreed, but also decided to join a college in Lahore where he continued to get into trouble. Though a rabble-rouser and an extremely restless personality, he was considered a bright student by his teachers.

In 1963, he joined the Punjab University from where he bagged a master’s degree in Urdu literature and also studied Arabic and Persian. It was here that he decided to become a dedicated qawaal. He later told an interviewer, he saw singing qawaalis as the only way he could have fulfilled his restless quest to find some spiritual meaning in his riotous existence.

He began to perform in front of small crowds at private functions. Visitors at the Data shrine would often see a young man with long, unkempt hair, colourful kameez-shalwar and wild eyes, pacing up and down. It was Aziz Mian.

To them, he could as well have been one of the many faqeers (spiritual vagabonds) that are often found at Sufi shrines in South Asia. But of course, he was different. He was articulate in his speech, and could speak fluent Punjabi, Urdu, Persian and English.

In those days (mid/late 1960s), Aziz Mian was mostly singing traditional folk qawaalis in Punjabi and in Persian, but after listening to the Sabri Brothers sing in Urdu (on radio) and then seeing them slowly gathering a whole new audience, Aziz Mian became restless again.

He didn’t want to sing traditional qawaalis anymore. He received qawaali lyrics from some lesser-known Urdu poets, but he rejected them, suggesting that the lyrics did not reflect the nature of his quest.

He tried to get in touch with the poets who were authoring Urdu lyrics for the Sabri Brothers, but he wasn’t taken seriously. Then in 1970, while sitting at the Data shrine, Aziz Mian began writing lyrics himself.

A decade later, while performing the qawaali that he had written at the shrine, Aziz Mian told the audience: ‘It was an evening just like this one. I was sitting at the Data shrine and conversing with God. I was praying for my well-being, when suddenly I began to be showered by a burst of words. I forgot what I was praying about and started to write down the emerging words right there …’

Thanks to the growing popularity of the Sabri Brothers, EMI-Pakistan had already given Aziz Mian some studio time to cut an album. But it would be the qawaali that he wrote at the shrine and then set to music that would go on to become his breakthrough moment.

The qawaali was titled Mein Sharaabi (I am a drunkard). On Sharaabi (first released in 1973), Aziz Mian also discovered and stamped a style of writing, composing and singing that he would retain for the rest of his career.

He embraced the approach of the ‘quarrelsome Sufis’ of yore, who, in their peculiar states of mind, would hold brassy passionate dialogues with God, punctuated with a series of paradoxical questions.

Aziz Mian would start slowly, break into a catchy chorus with his ‘qawaali party’ (qawaali group), and then suddenly break out with a series of argumentative verses in a blistering display of speed-talking. He would address God, complaining how he loved Him but felt that he wasn’t being loved back; or why such a perfect entity such as God would create such an imperfect creature like man!

Aziz Mian was a heavy drinker, and like various famous Sufi poets, he often used the state (and concept) of drunkenness as a metaphor to exhibit the inexplicable effect the love for the Almighty had on him. But he would also praise alcohol on its own terms.

With the success of the Mein Sharaabi album, Aziz Mian rose to become one of the region’s leading qawaals.

As mentioned earlier, many of his concerts used to disintegrate into becoming drunken brawls when Aziz Mian would work up the audience to such a frenzy that many among the crowd would lose all sense of order. Aziz Mian saw the commotion as a reflection of his inner self and/or of a state of turmoil that eventually leads a man to annihilate internal and external inhibitions and pave the way for him to construct a special bridge that connected him with the raw beauty and power of the Almighty.

Both Aziz Mian and the Sabri Brothers also benefited from the cultural policies of the populist regime of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1971-77).

The policies instructed state media to regularly telecast folk music and Qawaali on TV and radio, especially during a weekly show (on TV) called Lok Virsa, which became a huge hit.

Lok Virsa was also responsible for introducing (to mainstream audiences), folk musicians such as Mai Bhagi (Sindhi), Faiz Mohammad Baloch (Balochi), Tufail Niazi (Punjabi), Allan Fakir (Sindhi), Reshma (Saraiki), Pathanay Khan (Saraiki), Zarsanga (Pashto), etc.

Brawling giants
Compared to Aziz Mian, the Sabri Brothers were a lot more melodic and hypnotic in their style. Soon, a rivalry began to develop between them because both were catering to the same market. It was a brand new market made up of new Qawaali fans in the country’s urban areas.

The Brothers would often mock Aziz Mian for being vehement and lacking melody. But Aziz Mian went on honing his unique style.

The Brothers thought Aziz Mian was uncouth and exploiting the Qawaali genre for quick fame.

The rivalry between Aziz Mian and the Sabri Brothers took a more aggressive turn when, in 1975, both released their biggest hits to date.

Aziz Mian extended Mein Sharaabi by adding another 30 minutes to the qawaali until it became an almost 50-munute epic called Teri Soorat / Mein Sharaabi.

The album, released by EMI-Pakistan, sold over a million copies (LPs and cassettes) within a matter of months.

The same year, the Sabri Brothers released Bhar deh jholi ('Fill my bag') that also became a massive seller, especially when it was chosen as a song for a 1975 Urdu film Bin Baadal Barsaat, starring famous Pakistani film actor Muhammad Ali and actress Zeba.

The Brothers also appeared in the mentioned film, singing the qawaali at a shrine where Ali’s character is shown with his wife (Zeba), pleading the Sufi saint buried there to ask God to grant them a child.

The Pakistan film industry was hitting a peak in the mid-1970s. So Aziz Mian too appeared in a film called, License. In it, he could be seen performing an abridged version of Mein Sharaabi.

In early 1976, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, invited Aziz Mian to perform for him in Islamabad and share a drink. Aziz Mian gladly obliged.

The same year, while commenting on the Brothers during a concert, Aziz Mian lamented that the Brothers were too conventional and that their spiritual connection with the Almighty was not as stark as his.

Slighted by Aziz Mian’s comments, the Brothers released a thinly veiled taunt at him in shape of a qawaali. They titled it, O sharabi, chor dey peena (‘‘O’ drunkard, stop drinking’’).

The qawaali became an immediate hit, sung in the typically steady, controlled and hypnotic style of the Brothers, and then varnished with a bit of tongue-in-cheek humour aimed at Aziz Mian.

In a live bootleg recording of the qawaali, one can hear one of brothers poking fun at ‘drunkards’ (Aziz Mian). He is doing this in a tongue-in-cheek manner because he’s clearly conscious of the fact that the audience was also enjoying their drink, the other brother laughingly suggests, ‘but, of course, no one drinks here (in this hall).’

Aziz Mian was quick to retaliate. He wrote and recorded Hai kambakht, tu nein pe hi nahi (‘‘Unfortunate soul, you never even drank!’’). In it, he derided the Brothers for being deprived of understanding and experiencing the ‘spiritual dimensions of being drunk.’

The retaliatory qawaali starts with Aziz proudly owning up to liking his drink, then suggests that those who didn’t drink and gave lectures while indulging in other misdeeds at the same time, are hypocrites. All the while, he continues to taunt the Brothers for never having experienced intoxication.

In the long climax of the qawaali, Aziz Mian’s taunting turns into angry sarcastic jibes at the Brothers, as he dismisses them for not understanding his intoxicated love for the Almighty because they have no clue what it meant or felt like.

According to EMI-Pakistan, which released both the records, together Aziz Mian and Sabri Brothers, sold over two million LPs and cassettes in 1977 alone!

Fans of both the camps would often throw words and verses from the two qawaalis at each other.

Pakistani Qawaali had reached a commercial peak and then went global when Aziz Mian and the Sabri Brothers began touring outside Pakistan, enthralling audiences in various countries, including the US, UK, France, Germany, the Soviet Union and Iran.

Then, Aziz Mian suddenly fell on the wrong side of the law when, in April 1977, sale of alcoholic beverages (to Muslims) in Pakistan was banned. In July 1977, the Bhutto regime fell in a reactionary military coup orchestrated by General Ziaul Haq.

During the Zia dictatorship (1977-88), Aziz Mian’s concerts were often raided by the police and people there arrested for ‘drunken behaviour.’

In 1980, Aziz Mian began adding more conventional qawaalis to his set, but he always wrapped up his concerts with Mein Sharaabi.

However, he would usually launch into the said qawaali by first jokingly addressing the crowd (in Punjabi): ‘I’m about to sing Mein Sharaabi (the crowd would roar). But you guys don’t have to worry. They’ll arrest me, not you!’ (Crowds would burst into laughter).

On a number of occasions, Aziz Mian was approached by anti-Zia student and political outfits to release a qawaali against Zia.

He shied away. Instead, he decided to add extempore lyrics to his famous qawaalis that spoke about how men intoxicated by their love of God and justice stood up to tyrants who had no understanding and appreciation of this unique kind of love.

In 1982, during a small concert in Karachi where Aziz Mian had been invited to perform, he noticed some policemen inside the venue.

Believing that they would begin harassing the gathering the moment he launched into his 'Sharaabi' qawaali, he decided to test the patience of the cops by singing what became to be the longest qawaali recorded in the history of the genre!

Beginning the concert with his 1979 hit, the passionate Allah Hi Jannay Kon Bashar Hai (‘Only God knows who is human’), he then launched into Hasshar Kay Roz Yeh Poochon Ga (‘On the Day of Judgment, God shall ask’) – a qawaali that went on for 115 minutes.

Recorded at the venue and then released, the epic qawaali talks about God inquiring man about his (man’s) hypocrisies. Aziz Mian taunts the puritans who call him a drunk. He suggests that in reality, they were the ones who were drunk on things that were far more sinister than alcohol. Things like power, hypocrisy and prejudice.

Eclipse and end
By the time the Zia dictatorship ended (August, 1988), Pakistan’s ‘Golden Age of Qawaali’ was at an end. Frustrated by not being able to play enough concerts and record a lot more albums in Pakistan in the 1980s, Aziz Mian’s drinking problem worsened.

In the late 1980s, the supremacy of both Aziz Mian and the Sabri Brothers was successfully challenged by a little known qawaal who would (for a while) go on to regenerate the Qawaali genre in Pakistan, and once again turn it into a popular global phenomenon.

Immensely talented, Nusrat took the melodious dynamics of the Sabri Brothers and the lyrical spiritual paradoxes aired in Aziz Mian’s qawaalis and fused them into a style that was flexible enough to be adopted and related to on a more universal level.

Nusrat Fateh Ali’s 1993 epic, Tum Aik Ghorak Danda Ho adopts Aziz Mian’s style of arguing with God and fuses it with the Sabri Brothers’ hypnotic melodicism.

But unlike Aziz Mian, Nusrat did not write his own lyrics.

Nusrat Fateh Ali dominated the qawaali scene across the late 1980s and 1990s, selling albums and playing to packed audiences around the world. But like Aziz Mian, Nusrat too had a deep ‘love affair with drink.’ He died of liver failure in 1997.

In 1994, Ghulam Farid, leader of the Sabri Brothers, passed away. Aziz Mian continued to perform throughout the 1990s, but the rise of a new batch of qawaals led by Nusrat Fateh Ali never allowed Aziz the space to make his comeback and regain the popularity and commercial success that he had enjoyed between 1973 and 1982.

Exhausted and ailing with a failing liver, in 2000, he agreed to honour a contract to perform concerts in Iran. However, halfway through the tour, he passed away. He was 56.

Source: Aziz Mian: The Nietzschean Qawaal
Published in Dawn, October 9, 2015
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Smokers’ Corner: Strange bedfellows


In November 1982, veteran British film director, Richard Attenborough, released his historical epic, Gandhi. Based on the life of Indian nationalist and spiritual figurehead of the Indian National Congress, Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), the film was a box-office hit.

In April 1983 when the film won eight Oscars at Hollywood’s 55th Academy Awards ceremony, the Pakistan government (which, at the time, was being headed by the military administration of General Ziaul Haq), complained that the movie had undermined the role of Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah (in India’s struggle against British Colonialism) and had even distorted his image.

The film depicts Jinnah (played by Alyque Padamsee) as a snooty figure given to appeasing communal urges not because he believed in them, but because he was envious of Gandhi’s populist appeal.

Certainly the film’s writer, John Briley, and director, Attenborough, seemed to have largely based the characters of both Gandhi and Jinnah on how (till then) the state-backed Indian history had perceived these two men to be. Much of this history had been authored during the various Congress regimes that had come to power betweewn 1947 and the early 1980s.

Larger than life? Or perhaps not, Jinnah’s personality is still being explored
In this version of history, and, consequently, the film, the Mahatma is portrayed as being a man who, if he wanted to, could have even walked on water; whereas Jinnah was painted as being a character more passionate about his expensive suits than about Indian nationalism; and ultimately the man who used communal tensions to create a separate Muslim country just because he was resentful of Gandhi’s fame.

Myths (both positive and negative) about important people are usually created after their demise to suit the agendas of those who want to gain mileage from the legacies of the departed figureheads.

In the film, a scene shows Gandhi being ejected from a first-class railway carriage in racist South Africa after a white passenger objects to sharing space with a ‘coloured’ man (Gandhi). This is a myth that suited the Congress regime and its sympathisers in the Western press. The fact is, Gandhi’s demand to be allowed to travel first-class (with white South Africans) was actually accepted!

The culture editor of The Telegraph, Martin Chilton, wrote: ‘(This incident) rather than marking the start of a campaign against racial oppression, as legend has it, was the start of a campaign to actually extend racial segregation in South Africa. (The truth is) Gandhi was adamant that respectable Indians should not be obliged to use the same facilities as the blacks …’ He thought Indians were superior to blacks.

Historian and film critic, Alex von Tunzelmann, writing in The Guardian, noticed that the film also steers well clear of exploring Gandhi’s thoughts on Axis powers (headed by Nazi Germany), some of which might have made a Western audience choke on its popcorn!

Myths have tailed Jinnah for quite a while as well, especially after he, like Gandhi, passed away just a year after partition. To most official historians, Jinnah too, would have been able to walk on water. Till the early 1980s, Jinnah was largely presented in Pakistan as someone big but distant, important but elusive. He was never quite explored as a personality.

The Zia regime after reacting to the way Jinnah was portrayed in the film Gandhi, decided to bankroll a high-budgeted epic on Jinnah. But nothing much became of the project because initial research and the resultant scripts kept portraying a Jinnah that was quite different from the version of him that had begun to be sketched and propagated by the Zia regime.

From the impersonal, impalpable but almost numinous character drawn by the state before Zia, Jinnah had become (under Zia), a reactive ideologue who had worked tirelessly to construct an entirely theological state in South Asia.

As a response, in 1985, renowned scholar and historian, Ayesha Jalal, published the seminal, The Sole Spokesman. In it she cut to pieces the images of Jinnah popularised by the Congress regimes, the film Gandhi, as well as the image of the founder of Pakistan being concocted and proliferated by the Zia dictatorship.

Using sources that (till then) had been largely overlooked or even suppressed by most historians of India and those associated with the state of Pakistan, Jalal came up with a Jinnah who was rational, modern, compassionate and only willing to create Pakistan due to certain compelling historical circumstances, such as the receding of British colonialism, the rise of communal tensions between India’s Hindus and Muslims, and Jinnah’s growing suspicion of the Congress becoming an expression of Hindu nationalist Majoritarianism.

Jalal also attempted to produce evidence that suggested Jinnah wanted a modern Muslim-majority state as opposed to a theological one. Jalal’s thesis became the cornerstone upon which those scholars in Pakistan opposed to Zia’s (and that of the religious parties’) idea of Jinnah, constructed a powerful alternative narrative of the founder and the Pakistan Movement.

As these alternative theses have slowly but surely become a tad stronger in a Pakistan ruptured by disastrous post-Jinnah state experiments related to faith, these theories are not being so effectively tackled anymore by the ‘Ziaist’ narrative.

Instead, they are being challenged by the emergence of a new kind of Indian historical scholarship that is, ironically, substantiating the narrative of Pakistan’s creation first propagated by Pakistan’s religious groups and the ‘Ziaists!’

Recently Cambridge University Press published Creating A New Medina by Indian historian, Venkat Dhulipala. A hefty study on the politics of Muslim India before the creation of Pakistan, Dhulipala tries to prove that the creation of Pakistan was an entirely theological idea and (politically) even akin to Nazism in Germany!

Author and professor of South Asian history at University of Oxford, Faisal Devji, lambasted Dhulipala’s book for using obscure and unauthentic sources in his obsession to negate the thesis triggered by Ayesha Jalal’s 1985 book.

Interestingly, Devji himself doesn’t entirely adhere to Jalal’s thesis. But in his long review of Dhulipala’s book, he scathingly rips into him for treating Muslim political thought (in preparation India) as being entirely driven by, what Devji says is, Dhulipala’s narrow, clichéd and simplistic understanding of Muslim nationalism.

Personally, I have no idea where Dhulipala stands politically. But his book certainly seems to echo (consciously or otherwise) how Pakistan is seen by Hindu nationalists, especially the current breed that is experiencing an upsurge under Modi.

The irony is, unlike the Congress, which saw Pakistan as a ‘natural part of India’ that was supposedly broken away by an ‘egotistical’ and ‘envious’ Jinnah, the Modi-led BJP and radical Hindu nationalists are trying to explain Pakistan’s so-called ‘inclination towards religious terrorism’ as an outcome of the country’s creation being ‘inherently based on aggressive religious notions.’

Interestingly, if one is to ignore the anti-Pakistan Hindu nationalist aspects in the book (put there deliberately or in a more de facto manner), then Dhulipala’s thesis is also more than likely to be enthusiastically flaunted and propagated by the religious right of Pakistan!

Through this book, Pakistan’s national and religious conservatives will be able to actually negate the damage done to their intransigent narrative about the country’s creation by the likes of Jalal. Curious notion, but entirely possible.

Source: Smokers’ Corner: Strange bedfellows
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, October 11th, 2015
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Default October 15, 2015

Shoaib Malik: Wearing the inside out


Pakistani all-rounder Shoaib Malik's profile on the popular cricket website, Espncricinfo, begins by noting that Malik has played almost every role (as a player) in international cricket, but no one is quite sure what his role really is.
This enigmatic little quip actually sums up Malik’s personality rather well. Even though he’s been in and out of the Pakistan side since 1999, he has been largely unable to define exactly where his strengths as a cricketer lie.

What’s more, his captains and the coaches that he has played under (and with), too, seem all at sea in providing a consolidated and well-defined role for him in the team.

So, what is it about him that leaves so many of his cricketing contemporaries and elders baffled that they just cannot set a goal and a role according to the obvious talents that he has always possessed?

Some believe that Malik is just too withdrawn and detached as a personality and not very easy to understand or communicate with. No one knows what goes on in his head as he almost perversely blocks all attempts to be analysed, even by his closest colleagues.

Yet, there is this other Malik as well. A stubborn hothead who can suddenly fly off the handle like an angry young man responding to a slight inflicted by the powers that be.

But he’s not all that young anymore. He’s 33. However, he does seem to be on a path to correct this aspect of his puzzling temperament.

In January 2014, I was in Dubai interviewing Pakistan’s captain, Misbahul Haq at the hotel where the Pakistan team was staying (during a Pakistan-Sri Lanka series).

After conducting the interview, I also managed to meet a few other Pakistani players and the team’s coach at the time, Moin Khan.

During a brief conversation with a player there, Shoaib Malik’s name came up somehow. This player – a batsman who had played a lot of cricket with Malik – said, ‘Malik should have been part of this team.’

But he quickly added, ‘He (Shoaib) himself is the reason why he is not playing for Pakistan anymore. The captain (Misbah) would love to have him in the squad, but Malik refuses to realise that he can’t be in the team because of no other reason than the fact that his attitude is bringing him down …’

The player then (smilingly) also explained the attitude he was talking about:

‘It’s as if on a day-to-day basis he (Malik) swings like a pendulum (bari ghari ka danda). One day he is extremely quiet and lost in his thoughts, the next day he is cracking witty remarks and the next moment, he is sulking or lashing out, and no one knows what is making him swing to and fro like this …’

Well, yesterday, Malik’s temperament must have swung towards a much happier disposition as he continued to be on a dream-like comeback trail.

Returning to the Pakistan ODI and T20 sides after being completely written off, Malik smashed 500 runs (at a massive average of 114.41) in the 11 ODI games that he has played after returning to the side early this year.

His good form then bagged him a place in Pakistan’s Test squad, recently engaged in playing an important series against England in the UAE.

When Malik was selected to play in the first Test (still in progress), this was his first Test after spending a good five years in the wilderness.

He came in at no. 3 and would have done well to stay there a bit and maybe crack a 40 to reacclimatise himself to the exhaustive aura of Test cricket. Instead, he went on to pile a mammoth 245!

Misbah was seen applauding Malik’s Herculean effort enthusiastically. When Malik was selected (as a last minute addition) to the Test squad, Misbah did not hesitate to exhibit how pleased he was to have him in the team.

Malik’s recent form alone was not the only reason why Misbah sounded delighted to have him in his squad. Getting him in and then giving him a go in the very first Test of the series (apparently due to the injury suffered by Azhar Ali), Misbah was repaying a debt that he owed to Malik.

On a number of occasions, Misbah has named Malik as the man who (when he was captain) had fought a grueling battle with the selectors to bring back Misbah into the side after he had been left to wither away in the obscurity of domestic cricket.

Misbah had made his ODI and Test debuts in 2001-2002. But after being dropped from the squad just before the 2003 Cricket World Cup, he was largely forgotten about despite the fact that he was notching some impressive scores in domestic games.

Malik replaced the mighty Inzamam-ul-Haq as captain in 2007 (after the latter resigned due to the team’s terrible show at the 2007 World Cup). The same year also saw the inauguration of the T20 World Cup (in South Africa).

Malik wanted Misbah in the squad. The selectors were not quite sure. To them, Misbah was passé, even though the current Chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB), Shahryar Khan, claims in his book, The Cricket Conundrum, that the board was quite aware of Misbah’s good performances in domestic cricket, but that it was captain Inzamam who had kept him away from making his much deserved comeback.

Khan suggests Inzamam was ‘a highly insecure captain’ and ‘was suspicious’ of players who were more educated than him. Khan also alluded that Inzamam, who was promoting a certain strand of religiosity in the team (as a regulatory tactic), saw Misbah as not quite fitting in this scheme of things.

However, Misbah has repeatedly (and rather diplomatically), underplayed the issue, simply suggesting that (to him) a captain would not keep out a good player for reasons related to things other than cricket.

Another reason that Misbah often cites for his exclusion is that during Inzi’s captaincy, the team had a packed middle-order and it was difficult for a batsman like him to break back into the side.

Whatever the reason may have been behind Misbah’s wilderness years, Malik pulled him back into the Pakistan team for the 2007 T20 World Cup, and that too at the expense of the veteran, Mohammad Yousuf.

Misbah’s return too was impressive, until he was dropped again in 2010, to return once more in 2011, this time as captain of a side rocked by spot-fixing and infighting.

This time, he marched on to finally become a prolific batting mainstay in the team and then the country’s most successful Test captain, roping in more wins than any other Pakistan Test skipper.

So I’m sure Misbah could entirely relate to the way Malik has marked his return from the cricketing wasteland. But unlike Malik, Misbah’s temperament has remained one-dimensional: steady, calm, reflective. Always.

Malik, on the other hand, has been more like a misguided missile. Though not quite coupled by the media with the enfant terrible likes of yore, such as the moody and random Wasim Hassan Raja, the implosive Sarfraz Nawaz, and the confrontational Shoaib Akhtar, Malik’s eccentricities have been largely elusive and tough to comprehend.

Born in 1982 into a middle-class family in Sialkot (in Pakistan’s Punjab province), Malik was being groomed by his parents for a decent education and then a stable job. He was interested in cricket but only to the point of watching it on TV and playing it in the streets like any kid would in Pakistan.

However, in 1994, when he was 12, he gingerly walked into a ‘travelling coaching clinic’ (that had reached Sialkot). It was being headed by Pakistan’s former captain and cricket icon, Imran Khan.

Malik fancied himself as a batsman who could bowl a bit. But not much came out of his trip to the coaching clinic because he was soon barred (by his parents) from even playing cricket on the streets because it was disturbing his studies.

In an interview that he gave to cricket journalist, Osman Samiuddin, in 2004, Malik alluded that it was his mother who was the stricter parent, while his father would secretly encourage his passion to play.

In 1996, he slipped out of the house to attend trials that were being held to select a squad for an Under-15 World Cup in England.

To his parents’ surprise, he was selected and to his own surprise, he was picked in the side as an off-break bowler!

So batting went out the window and he began to concentrate on his bowling, managing to also make his way into the Pakistan Under-19 team for a series (in Pakistan) against the England U-19 team, which also included a young 17-year-old Freddie Flintoff (the future England star).

Impressed by Pakistan’s then latest off-spinning sensation, Saqlain Mushtaq, Malik began to remodel his bowling action. In 1997, he made his first-class debut in domestic cricket when he was selected to play for Gujranwala.

Former Pakistan batsman, Asif Mujtaba, was so impressed by Malik’s bowling that he jettisoned his entry into the much bigger (and better-paying) domestic side, PIA.

Malik was overjoyed, because PIA was studded with top Pakistani players, including Wasim Akram, Moin Khan and Malik’s idol at the time, Saqlain Mushtaq.

In 1999, while replacing an injured Saqlain Mushtaq in a domestic ODI game, Malik impressed Akram and Moin so much that they included his name in the Pakistan team that Akram was to lead for the Champions Trophy tournament in Sharjah.

Malik only got to know about his inclusion when he returned to Sialkot (from Karachi, where he had played the match). The news was broken to him by his ecstatic parents. They finally allowed their wistful teenager son to pursue his passion.

Though he bowled steadily in the tournament, he was aware of the fact that he won’t be getting many chances to retain his place after the return (from injury) of the spinning maestro, Saqlain Mushtaq.

Malik thus began to pester his captains in the domestic circuit to push him up the batting order so he could prove that he was an equally accomplished batsman.

In early 2000, the new Pakistan captain, Waqar Younus, began using Malik as an all-rounder, and sent him up the order during an ODI game against the West Indies in Sharjah. Malik grabbed the opportunity and smashed a quickfire century.

Then, in August 2001 (still just 19), he made his Test debut in Multan against the visiting Bangladesh. But it wasn’t an impressive debut, and he kept falling in and out of the team for the next two years until in 2004, when he began to score big (and pick regular wickets).

He was made a permanent member of the team by captain, Inzamam-ul-Haq, under whom Malik blossomed into becoming an exciting all-rounder.

Pakistan’s coach, the late Bob Woolmer, saw in Malik a future captain because (according to Woolmer), Malik’s ideas were ‘the most original and sharp’ (compared to other youngsters in the team).

Malik’s relationship with Inzamam was a largely quiet one. Though Malik never entirely submitted to Inzamam’s unique regime that mixed exhibitions of faith with cricket, he quietly went along, cementing his position in the squad.

In 2005, at the age of 23, he was made the captain of the Sialkot side in the country’s first major T20 tournament.

Captaincy brought out the other, more unsavoury, side of Malik’s personality; from being the quiet and easy-going character, he became a sharp, aggressive and determined man on the field.

Leading from the front and desperate to bag the national T20 title, he lost his temper at the umpires during a match against the Lahore Eagles. He accused the umpires of siding with the Eagles. And as if this wasn’t enough, he ordered his team to deliberately lose their next game (against the Karachi Zebras) just so the Eagles would be knocked out and fail to make the semi-finals.

During the post-match ceremony, commentator Rameez Raja asked Malik (live on TV) whether he thought his decision to throw away the game would dent his chances of ever captaining Pakistan in the future.

Malik exhibited no remorse. He told Rameez that he didn’t care if he was ever made (or not made) Pakistan’s captain. He said his actions were justified because he was left with no other option (by the tournament’s organisers). He lamented that the only option left for him was to throw away the game (as a matter of protest). He also reiterated his allegations against the umpires.

Malik was handed a 1-Test ban and a fine by the PCB.

In 2006, during a series against arch rivals India (in Pakistan), Malik exploded with the bat, blasting 90, 95 and 108 in three consecutive ODI innings. The same year he also notched his first ever Test century (against Sri Lanka). He told reporters in Lahore that his scores should once and for all shut his critics up (in the media).

After Pakistan were embarrassingly knocked-out from the 2007 World Cup, Inzamam resigned as skipper and PCB approached Younus Khan to become Pakistan’s next captain. Younus refused.

The board then decided to honour the observations made by Woolmer in 2005 about Malik’s potential to become a good captain. Woolmer had tragically passed away during the 2007 World Cup.

So Malik was made captain. Though his two-year stint as skipper was at best patchy, he did come close to winning the first ever T20 World Cup. During his captaincy, he had a falling out with Mohammad Yousuf, who accused him of keeping him out of the side.

Things went from bad to worse when the parents of an Indian-Muslim girl claimed that Malik had married their daughter.

Malik, who was once described by a cricketing friend as ‘a discreet Casanova’, immediately denied the allegations. The lady continued to appear on Indian TV for a while and accused Malik of betraying her trust. The family, however, could never prove that Malik had actually married the daughter.

In 2009, Malik was unceremoniously removed from captaincy after Pakistan lost badly against Sri Lanka. A leaked report (authored by the coach and management staff during the disastrous Lankan tour) claimed that Malik ‘had isolated himself, was uncommunicative, and hardly interacted with the players.’

The report also claimed that ‘apart from giving short 5-minute talks to the team, he would go quiet and seem lost in his own thoughts.’

However, the player I was talking to in Dubai (and who was also a member of that team) had told me that Malik (at the time) had fallen into depression because his ideas and tactics ‘would zoom over the coaching staff’s heads)’; and that ‘they (the tactics) were actually way ahead of their time …’

He had then added: ‘I now see similar ideas being implemented by a number of captains around the world …’

Malik remained in the team, though.

Malik showing the court order to the press.
Malik showing the court order to the press.
Malik’s form began to deteriorate and then, after a disastrous tour of Australia (under the captaincy of Mohammad Yousuf), Malik was banned by the PCB for a year (along with 7 other players).

Though PCB did not entirely explain why the bans were imposed, a report (quietly leaked to the press), suggested that Malik was slapped with a ban because he had not co-operated with the captain (Yousuf) and had tried to lead a rebellion against him.

Pakistan’s star all-rounder, Shahid Afridi, too had testified in front of the board and claimed that Malik had been ‘a bad influence on the team (during the tour) …’

Malik was livid. He took the PCB to court and was successful in getting the ban lifted.

Malik’s form, however, continued to slump. But this didn’t stop the ‘discreet Casanova’ to win over Indian tennis star, Sania Mirza, and marry her in April 2010. His Pakistan cricketing career, though, seemed to be as good as over. He was picked for the turbulent 2010 ‘spot-fixing’ tour of England, but not given a single game.

He was then entirely discarded after this tour.

Sania and Shoaib.
Sania and Shoaib.
Most players would have hung up their playing shoes by now, but just as Misbah had done during his years in the wilderness, Malik too, continued to play domestic cricket.

He turned his T20 Sialkot side into one of the most successful teams in the country. This got him selected to play in a few T20 matches for Pakistan. But in each of the few T20 games that he appeared in, he seemed out of sorts and never looked like becoming a permanent fixture in the Pakistan team again.

In May 2015, years after he had played his last major game, Malik was picked to play in a series against the visiting Zimbabwe team. His selection raised a lot of eyebrows and a section of the media questioned why a 33-year-old discard was being preferred over newer talent.

Under tremendous pressure to perform and win his place back in a side that had apparently forgotten about him, Malik smashed a century, signaling that this time he was here to stay.

He continued to pile on the runs in the next two ODI and T20 series, and was finally brought back into the Test squad as well.

His wife was at hand in Sri Lanka, cheering him on, during a series in which he finally proved that his comeback century against the Zimbabweans was not a fluke.

His bowling seemed to have improved as well, and for a 33-year-old, he still looked fit and as agile and flashy as ever, competing well with brilliant young fielders such as Anwar Ali and Mohammad Rizwan on the field.

In an interview that he gave when he was in the middle of piling those 500 runs in 11 innings, he confessed that (as a sportsman), he did feel compelled to make his way back into the Pakistan side every time his wife would do well on the tennis court. He said he was under tremendous pressure.

Well, now that he’s finally managed to come full circle, and will most probably be part of the Pakistan team for quite some time, I wonder if this was the kind of a roller coaster ride he was imagining when he took that gingerly walk into Imran Khan’s coaching clinic 21 years ago?

Source: Shoaib Malik: Wearing the inside out
Published in Dawn, October 15, 2015
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