The age of Misbah

Misbah was never in the league of those spontaneous cricketing talents, who burst onto the international scene at a very young age, exhibiting an early promise to become one of the game's best.

He was not a Mushtaq Mohammad, a Javed Miandad, a Wasim Akram, a Waqar Younus, a Shahid Afridi, or a Mohammad Amir. Unlike these folks, Misbah was nowhere close to playing international cricket as a teenager.

There was nothing ‘natural’ about his talent and skill when he finally broke into the Pakistan Test side in 2001 at the age of 27.

One can suggest that like former Pakistan captain and all-rounder Imran Khan, Misbah, too, evolved and painstakingly worked his way to that elusive level of being considered a great. However, Khan made his debut when he was just 18.

Nevertheless, in the last six years, Misbah has not only become one of the most proficient middle-order batsmen in the Pakistan side, but also Pakistan’s most successful Test captain.

But there are so many factors (some rather unique) related to Misbah’s gradual rise as batsman and captain, which make his story quite special.

A tale of spectacular rise
Misbah's story is not just about a quiet, reflective and empathetic man who, through sheer hard work and a finely measured amount of diplomacy, unhurriedly rose to become a cricketing icon.

Nor is it only about how, over and over again, as he resolutely battled the sporting equivalent of ‘old age,’ and years of constant criticism by his more impulsive contemporaries, and verbose talking heads on local sports channels, he continued to score heavily and that too, when it mattered the most.

Indeed all this contributed to his gradual and measured rise to become a Pakistan cricket icon, placed right there with greats such as Hanif Mohammad, Fazal Mahmood, Majid Khan, Asif Iqbal, Mushtaq Mohammad, Imran Khan, Javed Miandad, Abdul Qadir, Inzamam-ul-Haq, et al.

But the thing in his story which truly sets him apart — not only from his illustrious contemporaries in Pakistan, but also from the greats produced by other cricket-playing nations — is the fact that his (late) blooming as a batsman, and, more so, as a captain, all took place during a period when Pakistan cricket was in shambles; torn to shreds by spot-fixing scandals and vicious infighting.

It was trying to overcome an unprecedented and awkward slice of reality in which (after 2009), no country was willing to tour Pakistan.

Even more striking is the fact that Misbah was captaining a side of a cricket-crazy country which was fighting a chaotic and lingering existentialist battle with itself; a mêlée riddled with frequent terrorist attacks and bomb blasts which — between 2004 and 2014 — left over 60,000 innocent civilians, soldiers, cops and politicians dead.

The ‘war time’ captain

This was all happening when Misbah was leading Pakistan, with his team forced to play most of its games abroad (mainly in the UAE).

The UAE — with a sizeable Pakistani expat population — has become a kind of a ‘home ground’ for Pakistan cricket.

Fair enough, but this is what Misbah told me after I was done conducting a long interview with him in Dubai in January 2014:

'Playing in the UAE is nothing like playing at home. We come here as tourists, and each one of us requires a visa. I have no control here over how a pitch is to be prepared. It’s just like two foreign teams playing on a neutral ground. We have no homes here to go back to. We are constantly in hotels and our families are not always with us. We come here as a touring side, just like our opponents…'

He also lamented the fact that he has never led Pakistan in a Test at home; or on grounds and in front of crowds the players were more familiar with.

See: Misbah silences critics, scores remarkable century at Lord’s

Yet, he has gone on to become the country’s most successful Test captain, winning all his games on foreign soil, a feat unmatched by even the game’s greatest captains.

He simply smirks and slowly shakes his head when told that Pakistan have a ‘home advantage’ when they play in the UAE: ‘Home is where the home is,’ he had told me, still smiling. ‘Not where there are only hotels to go to; half-empty stadiums, and pitches one is never quite sure about …’

So Misbah’s remarkable and somewhat unique story is about a batsman who began playing his cricket late; was picked when he was already 27; dropped, and then not selected for another five long years.

He was then suddenly inducted into the country’s T20 squad (at age 33) during the format’s first World Cup; batted brilliantly and almost won the final for Pakistan; went on to establish himself in the Test side; but got dropped again and almost forgotten about, until suddenly earning a recall and made captain in 2010, at age 36. Quite a roller coaster ride, this.

The remarkable comeback
But this is when his story takes the kind of turns which make it so unique.

In 2014 (in Dubai), former Pakistan captain and wicketkeeper-batsman, Moin Khan (who was then the manager of the team), told a rather interesting story.

He said Misbah was first rescued from obscurity and recalled back into the side by the volatile Shoaib Malik.

In 2007, Malik was made captain, replacing Inzamam-ul-Haq, whose team had a rather disastrous World Cup in the West Indies. Inzamam retired and the young, talented, and somewhat confrontational, Malik was elevated and made the team’s new captain.

When the team was being selected for the first T20 World Cup in South Africa, Malik insisted on the inclusion of the then 33-year-old Misbah; and that too at the expense of the stylish veteran, Mohammad Yousuf.

Yousuf’s exclusion created a storm among fans and the media. The selectors weren’t quite sure why Malik would want to include Misbah, a batsman who had been discarded in 2002 and largely forgotten about — even though he had continued to play in domestic tournaments.

Moin told me that Malik had kept an eye on Misbah and was impressed by ‘his innovative stroke play and tenacity.’

Misbah’s comeback was dramatic: After scoring heavily in the 2007 T20 World Cup in South Africa, he almost pulled off a sensational win against India in the final. He was distraught when he failed to cross the very last hurdle beyond which lay victory.
Misbah’s comeback was dramatic: After scoring heavily in the 2007 T20 World Cup in South Africa, he almost pulled off a sensational win against India in the final. He was distraught when he failed to cross the very last hurdle beyond which lay victory.
This is true because when Shoaib Malik, who had been dropped from the Test side in late 2009, but began to perform well in ODIs and T20 games, Misbah recalled him to play in the 2015 Test series against England.

When asked why he had done that, Misbah explained that apart from the fact that Malik was in great batting form (in limited overs cricket), he (Malik) was the one who had fought with the board and the critics to include him (Misbah) in that 2007 T20 team.

Moin informed me that Misbah never harbours a grudge, but, at the same time, never forgets an act of empathy: ‘He simply withdraws into himself if he believes he has been slighted or unjustly criticised. But he would go out of the way to appreciate a generous or humane act…’

So exactly how did a quiet, private man, making his third comeback (in 2010), go on to mold a team of overbearing egos, in-fighting and scandals, into becoming a solid, settled Test side, who today is enjoying a place in the upper reaches of world rankings?

Misbah has often mentioned another veteran and mainstay of the team, Younis Khan, as the kind of empathetic soul who helped Misbah to grow back into the squad both as batsman and, more so, as a captain.

Khan has often praised Misbah as being an extremely hard-working and ‘pleasant’ man. But then so is Younis.

Examine: A captain in exile

But unlike Misbah, Younis has often gotten into spats with the cricket board, media, and fellow players; and, in fact, when he was captain, he faced a acrimonious players’ rebellion, allegedly led by Shahid Afridi.

Misbah clearly depends a lot on Younis and seems to have discovered an apt way to handle him and win his respect.

A media manager of the PCB, Nadeem Sarwar, who had facilitated my interview with Misbah in Dubai, told me that two reasons have helped Misbah the most in surviving so well as a captain of a volatile team:

‘His batting temperament and the way he stays on the crease, while everyone else was falling apart…this has gained a lot of respect for him from the players; especially the youngsters.

Respect like no other
Secondly, his man-management is excellent. He strives and makes an extra effort to understand the personality of each and every player and deals with them accordingly, man-to-man, person-to-person. He hears them out.’

Another interesting aspect of Misbah’s captaincy according to Sarwar was/is that he makes it plain through his own example that the seniors will have to earn their respect from the juniors and could not take it for granted.

‘Once upon a time, the seniors would act like pharos, keeping the younger players at an arm’s length and expecting them to do petty chores for the seniors,’ Sarwar explained.

‘Misbah changed all that. He and Younus are so approachable and they treat the youngsters like their little brothers. Players like Azhar Ali, Asad Shafique, Shan Masood and all the other youngsters treat him (Misbah) like a father figure,’ he had added.

A sober, reflective, resolute elder statesman is how Misbah comes across to most.

Yet, as Moin told me, there is a side to him very few know. In fact, in the interview, Misbah did allow himself to let me record that side when he said that as a person he wasn’t as serious as everybody thinks he is.

A young PCB official (his name, unfortunately has slipped my mind), who had sprinted out of the Pakistan dressing room during the second Test in Dubai in the Pakistan-Sri Lanka series (in 2014), to hand me my press pass, told me that the players loved Misbah’s sense of humour.

‘He is actually very witty,’ he said. ‘His houmour is like Anwar Maqsood’s (!)…he quietly slips in a witty remark which is extremely funny and yet, never offensive.’

He said Misbah is very close to Saeed Ajmal and both often exchange witty and hilarious remarks. Hafeez is another good friend and so is Shoab Malik. Azhar, Shaan and Asad admire him as an elder brother.

He said though both Younus and Misbah have a tremendous amount of respect for one another, they are not buddies, as such.

What about Afridi?

‘They just have a functional relationship…that’s all,’ he answered. This was told to me in 2014. Recently, however, Afridi has been very vocal about Misbah being ‘a very decent man.’

Coming back to Misbah’s now well-known man-management skills, I have always wondered how volatile and eruptive players such as Shoaib Akhtar would have fared had they played under Misbah.

Most experts of the game and even Akhtar himself believe that he (Akhtar) was badly handled by Inzimam who seemed have had no clue how to manage a character like him.

Pakistani captains, such as Mushtaq Muhammad and Imran Khan, are known to have successfully handled erratic and impulsive men in the most intelligent and effective manner. Eccentrics such as Sarfraz Nawaz and WasimRaja were empathetically handled by Mushtaq. He succeeded where others had completely failed.

Imran too was effective in handling men like Nawaz and the moody Abdul Qadir, though one can say not so much with Raja.

Akhtar, in his biography, wished he had had been captained by Imran.

So how would Akhtar have fared in Misbah’s team? Early last year I posed this question to a former medium-pace bowler who had played for Pakistan in the 1980s*.

He said: I don’t think Misbah would have tolerated a character like Shoaib, like Inzi did. But, who knows, with the way Misbah is, Shoaib would have been empathised with and made to calm down…’

Akhtar has often been critical of Misbah, and so has Mohammad Yousuf. But whereas Afridi would strike back and lash out at critical ex-cricketers (sometimes quite justifiably), not even once has Misbah responded directly to barbs pointed at him.

As he told me in the interview, he let his performance do the talking but he does often fall into despair when some unjustified remarks against him depress his wife and mother.

To Misbah, his family is everything. He is married to a cousin of his, Uzma, who, compared him, is a lot more expressive, extroverted and animated. She has also been extremely supportive of him.

Often seen in the stands (with their young children) at the stadiums Misbah is playing in, she jumps with joy, claps as loudly as possible, and at times even lets out a whistle or two, every time her husband crosses a cricketing milestone.

Her joy, in this respect, runs deeper than merely expressing happiness at what is taking place in the middle at that very moment. Because she has seen him sulk for years after he was first dropped in 2002. She saw him return (in 2007), but once again discarded a few years later.

Misbah had told me that though he rarely reads or hears what is being written or said about him, his wife and mother can’t help ignoring it. He added he is less pained by unjustified and malicious criticism than he is by how it brings down the spirits of his wife and mother.

At the end of the third Test match during the 2014 Pakistan-Sri Lanka series in which Misbah and Azhar Ali helped the team chase down over 350 runs in less than 60 overs to square the series, a TV channel immediately interviewed Misbah’s mother in his hometown in Mianwali.

This is what she said: ‘I knew that by the grace of Almighty, my son’s hard work will pay off. He is a stubborn person. He was stubborn even as a child. He never gives up. Yet, he is a loving person who is a good human being.’

Then she could not help it and launched into his critics: ‘I have never understood why some people are so critical of him. What do they have to say now?’

But why was a batsman, who has continued to score big constantly in the last six years, left out of the team for five years, or when he was a lot younger?

Over the years, newspaper reports, articles and even some books authored by insiders have all alluded that due to the fact that he was well-educated and someone who keeps his faith to be an extremely private matter, he was unacceptable to Inzamam-ul-Haq, who encouraged the players to wear their faith on their sleeves.

However, Misbah has always refused to believe this, some say purely due to his diplomatic nature. To me, he said that no captain would like to keep out a good player. And that teams are picked by captains on how they judge the skills of the players and not on the captain’s personal likes or dislikes.

So he wasn’t skillful enough between 2002 and 2007?
This he explained by suggesting that at the time the Pakistan middle-order was packed with some very good batsmen and this is what kept him out.

Ironically, Inzimam today is the chief selector and he gave Misbah exactly the team he asked for (for the England tour). Even though according to a newspaper report, whereas Inzi wanted Misbah to play Azhar Ali as an opener, Misbah dismissed the idea, suggesting that since the team had a third opener (Sami Aslam), he’d rather play him. ‘Why take him to England then?’ he asked.

Two years after Misbah’s mother lambasted his critics, Misbah has gone on to become his country’s most successful Test captain with a very healthy batting average and an iconic stature.

Indeed this stature which he has worked so hard for to achieve after years of languishing in obscurity has a lot to do with him performing so consistently; and succeeding in molding a formidable and united Test squad from the debris of discontent and turmoil which he was handed in 2010.

Yet, it is also about when he did this. That is, at a time when his country was facing perhaps its gravest existential crisis; there was unprecedented violence and bloodshed, and Pakistan had begun to be treated as a pariah state, or even a failed state.

Heroes had vanished, or couldn’t last beyond those figurative 15 minutes of fame. In the last two years especially, Misbah began to emerge, and be perceived as a genuine hero in a country who desperately needed one.

A friend recently made an interesting comment after watching the thousands of tweets which greeted Misbah when he smashed a brilliant century in his very first Test in England.

The friend said: ‘Misbah began to be perceived a hero on a much larger scale from early 2014. This is when General Raheel Sharif cut the slack and persuaded everyone to launch an extensive operation against the terrorists. As the operation gained momentum, so did Misbah’s status. He is to Pakistan cricket, what Raheel Sharif is to Pakistan army. God bless him.’

In chronological order: The rise, fall, rise, fall and rise of Misbah
1980s: Fluctuating between playing proper and ‘tape-tennis’ cricket. Parents more interested in him getting a good education.

1990s: Joins University as an MBA student. Plays irregular club cricket before making his first-class debut in 1998 at age 24.


2001: Makes Test and ODI debut for Pakistan. Shows promise.

2002: Is dropped due to lack of form.


2002: Misbah in his last game before he was dropped and not given a chance for the next five years.

2003-2007: Kept out of the team. Continues to play domestic cricket. Planning to call it quits in late 2006.

2007-2008: Makes a dramatic comeback at age 33. Performs brilliantly in T20 World Cup and series against India. Is made Pakistan’s Vice-Captain.

2009: Begins to lose form again. Dropped again.

2010: Is unexpectedly recalled to the side and made captain.

2011-2013: Becomes one of the most consistent batsmen in the side. Achieves the feat of being the only Pakistan captain to defeat England in a series, 3-0. Faces constant criticism for being 'too defensive'. Resigns as T20 captain. Retains Test and ODI captaincy.

2014-2016: Batting consistency continues. Dubbed as ‘man of crisis.’ Helps chase a record total against Sri Lanka in a Test in Sharjah. Batting average shoots up. Retires form ODI cricket in 2015. Becomes Pakistan’s most successful Test captain (20 wins). Announces retirement. Is requested by board to prolong career till 2016 England, West Indian and Australian series. Notches a century in his very first Test match in England, aged 42.


The name has been withheld on request.
Source: The age of Misbah
Published in Dawn, July 15th, 2016

Smokers’ Corner: Edhi, the politician

Much has been written about Abdul Sattar Edhi, the tireless philanthropist who against some extremely daunting odds, managed to construct a most effective, loved and trusted charitable empire in Pakistan.

Edhi Sahib’s overwhelming humanitarian impulse which often throbbed for the needy without exhibiting any religious or social bias, is brilliantly captured in Tehmina Durrani’s 1996 book, Mirror to the Blind.

However, surprisingly, there is one aspect of Edhi Sahib’s celebrated life that has only scarcely been documented. That of Edhi, the politician. At least for the first 25 years of his career as a restless philanthropist, Edhi was not repulsed by politics. His disdain for politicians and members of the clergy started to became more apparent from the late 1980s onward.

Durrani’s book suggests that certain obstacles which he faced in conducting his charity work in Karachi’s impoverished Kharadar area in the early 1960s, saw him making an attempt to enter politics through Ayub Khan’s ‘basic democracies’ framework.

The one scarcely documented aspect of Edhi Sahib’s celebrated life
But instead of allying himself with Ayub’s ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Convention, Edhi instead approached the Combined Opposition Parties (COP) during the 1965 Presidential election. In the election, over 80,000 ‘basic democrats’ were to be elected by the people across West and East Pakistan. The elected candidates in turn were to elect the President.

Ayub had come to power through a military coup in 1958. He became president at the height of his largely liberal regime in 1962. But by 1965, the regime had begun to lose its sheen when the economic gaps between a new business and military elite and other sections of the society began to widen.

COP was a mixture of various left and right parties. For example, it had the time’s largest left-wing outfit in Pakistan, the National Awami Party (NAP), as well as the conservative religious party, the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI). These two, along with some smaller parties, had convinced Fatima Jinnah to be their presidential candidate.

Ms. Jinnah was the sister of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah (d.1948). She had become vocal against the Ayub regime, accusing it of being undemocratic and tilted towards benefiting only a handful of ‘cronies’.

Durrani, in her book, alludes that Edhi Sahib’s decision to become a basic democrat candidate for COP was also influenced by the fact that he became perturbed by the accelerating rate of poverty in Karachi’s many impoverished areas.

Though Karachi voted heavily in favour of Ms. Jinnah, Edhi lost from the area he was contesting from i.e. his beloved Kharadar. Ayub was reelected as President.

Not much is known what position Edhi took during the countrywide movement against the Ayub regime in 1968. But he again registered as a contestant, this time for the historical 1970 general election — the country’s first based on adult franchise.

Z.A. Bhutto’s populist Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) in West Pakistan, and the Bengali nationalist outfit, the Awami League in East Pakistan, were emerging as the time’s two strongest parties.

But the staunch individualist in Edhi saw him registering as an independent candidate from Karachi’s working-class area of Lyari. Due to his charity activities, he had become a much loved figure here. Nevertheless, by 1970, Lyari had already begun to emerge as a boisterous bastion of the PPP.

It is not known why Edhi did not associate with the PPP which was promising to radically uplift the economic status of the poor. A few years ago, in an interview to a local news channel, his wife, Bilquis Edhi mentioned that Edhi Sahib refused to spend any money on his campaign and would even refuse to treat potential voters with a cup of tea!

More interesting is the fact that it was the conservative Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), which came forth to support his candidature. So much so, that the hefty and rather excellent compilation, Elections in Pakistan, by researcher, Tahir Mehdi, places Edhi as a JI candidate.

The election was won by PPP’s A. Sattar Gabol, who received 48,444 votes.

Edhi managed to bag 10,425 votes, despite the fact that he hardly spent any money on his campaign and the JI had very few voters in Lyari.

But some sources maintain that Edhi withdrew his candidature and actually made speeches in favour of the PPP; and that the JI candidate was ‘some other Abdus Sattar.’

Whatever the case may be, Edhi’s affair with politics was not dented. Though the government of Z.A. Bhutto began to support his charitable cause, Edhi was disappointed by the slow pace of Bhutto’s reforms.

In 1975, he was back as a candidate, this time during a by-election in the Karachi 7 district which today comes under the large NA250 constituency. The constituency had been won in 1970 by Shah Ahmad Noorani, the leader of the Jamiat Ulema-i-Pakistan (JUP). He had vacated the seat in 1975 to become a senator.

Once again Edhi registered as an independent. In his book, A Journey to Disillusionment, veteran progressive politician, Sherbaz Khan Mazari, wrote that the combined opposition alliance, the United Democratic Front (UDF), botched the election when two of its religious outfits could not agree upon a consensual candidate.

UDF was formed in 1974. It was made up of the right-wing/religious JUP, JUI and JI; the centrist PML factions; and the left-wing NAP. Mazari wrote that JI wanted its candidate to be backed by the UDF in Karachi 7. JUP, which had won the constituency in 1970, refused, and instead put up its own man. The JI in turn decided to back Edhi.

The commotion gave PPP’s Noorul Afrin an opening and he won by bagging 27,623 votes. The JUP candidate came second with 24,224 votes. Edhi could bag only 7,611.

Ms. Durrani’s book suggests that Edhi developed a lasting soft spot for Z.A. Bhutto when the latter was hanged by the Gen Zia dictatorship in 1979. Edhi’s relations with the reactionary Zia dictatorship were not cordial. But he refrained from taking any political stand during this period.

With the rise of ‘welfare’ organisations associated with militant religious outfits during the Zia regime, Edhi frequently found himself being challenged by the more aggressive tactics of these organisations.

This is also when he began to be accused of being a communist and a ‘bad Muslim.’ Edhi responded by suggesting that he found nothing wrong in the philosophy of Karl Marx. According to his wife, once when they were performing the Haj, Edhi Sahib refused to pelt the pillars symbolising the devil. Instead, he kept the pebbles in his pocket, saying that there were bigger devils in Pakistan and he will pelt them instead!

He would also attract the wrath of the clerics by regularly praying alongside his wife, daughters and female orphans at the Edhi-run orphanages.

In 1985 Edhi once again decided to contest an election. This was during the year’s ‘partyless polls’. Political parties were debarred by the Zia regime from contesting. But many parties, including those who were boycotting these elections (such as the PPP), did support individual candidates.

Edhi volunteered as a candidate from a constituency in Karachi. The PPP decided to support him. Edhi accepted the backing, but eventually dropped out of the race for unknown reasons.

After this, Edhi quit politics altogether, even though he was offered party tickets by the PPP in 1990 and 1993; and, according to some, by the Musharraf-backed PML-Q in 2002. But by then Edhi was convinced that politics had become an anathema for those willing to resign their lives doing selfless deeds of charity.

Source: Smokers’ Corner: Edhi, the politician
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, July 17th, 2016

__________________
The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion !

Perspective
Who's the boss?

Who's the boss? Well, in the context of the world, no one's the boss. The world is quite boss-less at the moment — which is kind of scary. Thus, it's quite reassuring to know that such is not the case in Pakistan. We do have a boss, and, no, he's not the guy who was elected as the prime minister in 2013.

General Raheel Sharif is the boss. There's no hiding the fact. Nor was this ever hidden, as such. And neither is there any amount of treachery in claiming this. Even the prime minister knows this, though he is not all that comfy about it.

General Sharif is really good at what he's good at, unlike his immediate predecessor, whose definition of good meant the good bad and the bad bad, if you get my drift. He was suave too, but more like a king-making politico than a boss boss.

Technically, the prime minister is the boss of the boss. In reality though, well, we all know. However, despite some misgivings on the issue of who the world thinks is the boss in Pakistan, I believe the prime minister is largely fine with his technically subservient and realistic boss.

Also read: What is Pakistani art? By Farid Alvie

He could not have gotten a better man. Because, so far, the boss hasn't played any of that shadowy politics which many of his predecessors were so fond of playing. Instead, he took the initiative to do what all our technical bosses, big and small, were not so sure about: he went to war with the very scary ones. And then he began to win this war.

So the prime minister, I think, is fine with that. Not entirely, but kind of. However, the boss has been rather confusing for a lot of other folks. He just hasn't been what he was expected to be. Most religious parties are not very happy with him. He's just not what the previous bosses were like: accommodating.

He even ends up confusing the not-very-pious-yet-posing-to-be-pious lot, such as Imran Khan and some very animated TV guys. They just can't make head or tails of his moves: when they expect him to move one way, he moves the other; when they expect him to do one thing, he does two very different things; when they expect him to come their way, he takes the highway.

When all of them run up to the highway, he goes to meet his soldiers on some remote mountain or hill which is only reachable by a helicopter.

He confuses the jamhooriat lot too. They desperately want him to behave like bosses usually do and did, but on many occasions, he has done what the jamhoories ought to have done but didn't.

Someone recently told me that the boss reminded him of Ayub Khan. Yes, that capitalist, liberal fascist dictator. I don't think the boss is anything like Khan. Because he's just too quiet. Too reserved. Too busy. Nobody's really seen him speak. But they do all talk about him. As if he just had coffee with them. Or so they wish.

The boss is certainly not like the boss who followed Ayub Khan. The hefty guy who just wasn't good at what he was supposed to be good at. The chap who was more interested in listening to tunes crooned to him by the great Madam.

He is definitely, positively, nothing like that foxy boss who confused politics with piety, and then piously rearranged everything according to his idea of piety, making a pie out of piety and then eating it too. What an awkward boss he was. One can still see him in so much of what has gone so very wrong in the Republic.

Nor is the boss like the man-child who came in and tried to be like Ayub Khan, but ended being one long self-parodying skit!

You know, whenever I praise the boss, I get trolls coming from the far right, and trolls coming from the far left, pushing me right down in the middle. I'm fine with being in the middle. Because, I believe, that's where the boss is too — even though I still haven't had any coffee with him.

The writer is a cultural critic and senior columnist for Dawn Newspaper. He tweets @NadeemfParacha

Source: Who's the boss?
Published in Herald, July 24th, 2016.

__________________
The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion !

Men on horseback: A century of coups

Military coups: A 20th century phenomenon
The 20th century was the era of military coups — mostly in developing countries in Asia, Africa and South America.

The phenomenon was largely associated with the dynamics of the erstwhile Cold War — a conflict fought by proxy between the time’s two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.

Military coups were prominent instruments used by the superpowers to initiate a rapid regime change in countries where a government was perceived to have become a threat to the regional, political and economic interests of the major powers.

Ideology too played a role, but it was only tributary compared to interests which were related more to the realpolitik of the Cold War.

Both the superpowers used their intelligence agencies to infiltrate the politics and militaries of various regimes; they funded and helped plan military coups and then the regimes which came to power through these coups.

The US was most successful in this respect. It backed and funded a number of military coups across Asia, Africa and South America. It then sustained rigid military dictatorships because they were seen as barriers against leftist revolutions, which (as these did in Cuba, Angola and Nicaragua), had the tendency to largely tilt towards the ‘Soviet camp.’

Some of the most brutal coups backed by the US (in South America) took place in Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Brazil and El Salvador. All were against regimes perceived by the US to have been leftist and allegedly ‘working to establish Soviet influence in South America.’

The ploy to use coups to topple regimes which were perceived to have been sliding towards the Soviet Camp (and thus threatening regional and economic interests of the US and other major western powers) was also used in Asia.

A left-leaning nationalist regime elected in Iran in 1952, and which had sidelined the Iranian monarchy and begun a project to nationalise American and British oil companies in the country, was systematically toppled in a US and UK backed coup d’etat in 1953.

The US used its intelligence agencies and Iranian agents among the pro-monarchy sections of the Iranian military and society; and, ironically, also utilised the services of a large number of Iranian religious leaders, to whip-up protests against the nationalist regime. It then used this pretext to topple the government in a military coup.

In Indonesia, the US had been funding the opponents of Indonesian nationalist leader and president, Sukarno, because, though a nationalist, he was seen as being close to the large Indonesian Communist Party.

In 1965, when the communist party, frustrated by the slow reforms of the regime, tried to overthrow Sukarno with the help of left-leaning military officers; a stronger pro-US faction of the military intervened, and unleashed members of radical religious outfits to commit massacres and large scale atrocities against the communists and their sympathisers.

Thousands of Indonesians perished in the commotion before the pro-US Indonesian military chief, General Suharto, toppled the regime in a military coup.

In 1971, the staunchly anti-communist and pro-US dictator of Thailand, Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn, carried out a purge within the Thai military after facing protests against his regime on the streets. He believed that certain pro-Soviet officers were planning a coup against his regime.

Another US-backed coup took place in Thailand in 1976 when a movement headed by pro-Soviet and pro-China student groups turned violent. They were brutally crushed by the coup leaders.

US also directly facilitated two military coups in South Korea (1961 and 1979), thwarting any attempt of a dialogue between South Korea and the communist dictatorship in North Korea.

The violent 1975 coup in Bangladesh is alleged to have been backed by the US, but no conclusive evidence of this has ever surfaced.

However, though the coup (against a nationalist regime) faced a counter-coup (by left-leaning officers), this coup too was neutralised by yet another counter-coup which brought to power a pro-US military regime.

Declassified documents (in the US) suggest that the US backed the 1958 military coup in Pakistan because a pro-Soviet leftist party, the NAP, was expected to win the 1959 election.

Various political historians in Pakistan have also suggested that in 1977, the US helped facilitate a right-wing movement against the populist regime of ZA Bhutto and support a coup against him because he had refused to stop Pakistan’s nuclear program. No clear-cut evidence of this has so far surfaced, though.

The US was also instrumental in backing military coups in Africa. But coups, especially in central Africa, became so frequent and chaotic, that both the Soviet Union and the US largely decided to leave alone such countries because they didn’t quite have the resources or regional importance to play a significant role in the Cold War.

The most notorious US-backed coup in Africa took place in 1960 in the Republic of Congo against the popular nationalist (and left-leaning) president, Patrice Émery Lumumba, after he had asked the Soviet Union for aid and expertise.

But it wasn’t always about ousting regimes which were seen as moving towards the Soviet camp. The US also backed coups against regimes which were installed by the American government itself!

In 1963, the US government approved a coup against its main man in South Vietnam, Ngô Đình Diệm, who was leading the fight against Soviet-backed North Vietnam troops and the communist Viet Cong guerrillas. The US deemed Diem’s regime unfit to control the ‘communist menace’ and the turmoil in South Vietnam.

In Turkey too (a country which was part of the US-led Nato alliance), military coups (especially in 1960, 1971 and 1980) were quietly backed by the US. Reasons to support coups against pro-US regimes here was the fear that Turkey was floundering as an ally (in 1960); and was gripped by leftist militancy (1971; 1980).

Compared to US-backed coups during the Cold War, coups backed by the Soviet Union were less in number, mainly due to the Soviet policy of attempting regime change by funding and backing revolutionary movements and militancy.

For example, not a single military coup was backed by the Soviet Union in South America where the Soviets instead, largely concentrated on funding leftist guerrilla movements and left-leaning regimes.

The Soviet Union’s first backing of a coup took place in a European country when in 1945, the Soviet Union facilitated the communist party and the military of Romania to eliminate all opposition and establish a communist dictatorship in the country.

The Soviets repeated this in 1948 in Czechoslovakia.

Though the Soviet Union was not involved in backing nationalist coups in Syria, Egypt and Iraq in the 1950s and 1960s, the regimes which came to power following the coups all came under Soviet influence.

No evidence has surfaced about Soviet involvement in the 1969 military coup in Libya as well, but Libya decided to follow Egypt, Syria and Iraq’s lead to move into the Soviet sphere of influence.

The same is true about the 1962 and 1965 coups in Algeria, a country which opted to have closer ties with the Soviet Union.

However, there is evidence that the military coup which took place in Burma in 1962 did have Soviet (and Chinese) backing.

There is also evidence of Soviet involvement in the 1974 coup in Ethiopia which overthrew the country’s monarch. Soviet involvement was also present in two further coups which finally established a leftist military junta in Ethiopia in 1977.

The Soviet Union’s last major foray into using the ploy of enforcing a regime change through a coup d’etat came in Afghanistan.

It backed a nationalist coup in 1974 against the Afghan monarchy, and then facilitated a leftist military coup in 1978 when the nationalist government agreed to accept US aid and assistance.

Outside of Asia, South America and Africa, not many coups took place in Europe. We have seen that the Soviet Union was involved in facilitating two coups in Europe; however, the US too backed a coup in the continent. The 1967 right-wing military coup in Greece was initially backed by the CIA.

After the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, military dictatorships began to be replaced by democratic set-ups. Military coups became extremely rare.

Thwarted: Military coup attempts neutralised by popular uprisings
A study of successful military coups in the 20th century suggests that they were frequent; yet, the amount of coups which failed actually outnumbers the ones which succeeded.

However, very few of them failed due to widespread popular opposition.

In 1961, a group of former generals of the French army who had served in the then French colony of Algeria, planned to topple the government of Charles de Gaulle through a military coup.

Gaulle had planned to give Algeria its independence after a bloody war had raged there between French troops and Algerian nationalists.

The generals with the help of sympathetic officers and soldiers planned to gain control of the troops serving in Algeria and then take-over Paris with the help of paratroopers dropped over France’s strategically located airfields.

In April, troops loyal to the plotters took control of several battalions in Algeria and arrested pro-Gaulle ministers. Then, from a clandestine radio station in Spain, the plotters announced that they have taken control of the French army stationed in Algeria.

The very next day, Gaulle, who was a World War-II hero, appeared on French TV and radio and appealed to the people and the military to resist the coup attempt.

The first to respond were members and supporters of left-wing parties who appeared on the streets and denounced the coup attempt. This was followed by a strike called by the country’s largest trade unions. Members of the French intelligentsia and civil society too came out and denounced the coup attempt.

Civilian demonstrations and the fact that Gaulle’s address was also heard by troops stationed in Algeria, convinced the troops to not follow the path taken by the plotters.

On April 16, the coup was crushed.

Soon after, one of France’s leading newspapers, L’Express claimed that the coup had the backing of the American CIA who was perturbed by Algeria’s independence because they believed it would lead to a pro-Soviet government in Algiers. It did lead to that.

In 1973, Colonel George Papadopoulos, who in 1967, had taken-over power in a military coup in Greece, abolished the Greek monarchy. Greece had been a constitutional monarchy.

Ironically, when Papadopoulos and fellow colonels had taken over power in 1967, the king had refused to order any action against the coup-makers.

The coup was backed by the American CIA who had alarmingly seen the coming into power of an elected centre-left regime in Greece.

However, the conduct of the military junta in Greece was such that US President, Lyndon B. Johnson, asked the Greek king to use generals loyal to him to launch a counter-coup. The counter-coup failed and the king went into exile.

But Greece remained to be a monarchy, though now without a parliament, and under the control of a military junta, which, being a product of staunchly conservative ideas, needed the traditional moorings of a monarchy in their scheme of things.

But in 1973, when the economy began to buckle and Papadopoulos became president through a bogus referendum, he launched a purge within the military and abolished the monarchy.

He then sent in troops to a university in Athens to crush a left-wing students’ protest. Military tanks crashed in through the gates. The chaos which followed saw a military general, who was part of the regime, organise a counter-coup which toppled Papadopoulos.

Plotters of the counter-coup accused Papadopoulos of being weak and not able to safeguard the ideals of the 1967 coup.

When Turkey invaded neighboring Cyprus which was also close to Greece, many top military officers withdrew their support from the coup, and civilians poured out on the streets denouncing the coup and demanding a return to democracy.

In 1974, the coup collapsed and democracy returned to Greece.

In 1990, a hardline group in the ruling Soviet Communist Party and the KGB, who were radically opposed to the liberalisation policies of Soviet head of state, Mikhail Gorbachev, received intelligence that they were to be replaced by those more sympathetic to Gorbachev’s reforms.

A veteran member of the Communist Party, Gennady Yanayev, used the KGB to put Gorbachev under house arrest. He then announced a state of emergency and alerted troops in Moscow.

Yanayev also ordered the arrest of Soviet president, Boris Yeltsin — a former communist who had become a vocal advocate of political and economic reform.

Yeltsin managed to evade arrest and reach the Soviet parliament building.

Here, he appealed to the military and the people to resist the coup, and guarantee Gorbachev’s release.

Military tanks began to roll towards the parliament building. But then so did groups of civilians. The people began to erect a barricade around the building.

In the evening, the military declared a curfew. This was taken as a sign that soldiers were planning to launch a siege and force their way into the building.

A crowd set fire to a military vehicle; and when the troops stationed outside the building received orders to attack it, they did not comply. The coup eventually collapsed. Yeltsin emerged from the parliament and spoke to the crowds from atop a tank which had refused to fire.

After the failed coup attempt, the Soviet Union broke up.

In 2002, the socialist government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela was removed by a military coup.

Days before the coup attempt, political parties opposed to the socialist policies of the Chavez government had organised a huge rally. The rally marched towards the presidential palace where it clashed with the supporters of the regime.

Gunfire was exchanged between the two groups and 19 people were left dead. The military approached Chavez and asked him to resign. Saying he was an elected president, Chavez refused.

He was arrested and taken to an unknown location. The people were told that Chavez had resigned and asked for political asylum in Cuba.

The military installed a prominent opponent of Chavez, Pedro Carmono, as interim president. He dissolved the national assembly and the country’s Supreme Court. He also declared the 1999 constitution void.

His announcement was not taken well by impoverished families residing in the slums of Venezuela’s capital. They had been Chavez’s main constituency.

Thousands of slum dwellers began to march towards the presidential palace where Carmono had settled with his cabinet.

Many Chavez supporters also besieged the television channels owned and run by opposition parties, and occupied them.

This was when members of the presidential guard surrounded the palace and demanded the return of Chavez. Carmono escaped and left the country. The coup collapsed and Chavez returned to power.

It is interesting to note that in 1992, when Chavez was a member of the military, he had attempted to pull off a military coup which had failed. He was arrested and thrown in jail. After his release, he became a politician and was elected as president in 1999.

*A military coup attempt was thwarted by a popular uprising in Turkey recently. Details of the event are still sketchy and scarce to be elaborated here.


The one that got away
There has been only one incident in which a military coup was launched to establish a democratic set-up.

In the 1920s, a strictly conservative dictatorship which worked closely with the Catholic Church was established in Portugal after a successful coup d’etat. The military chose an economist, Antonio Salazar, to head the government and he managed to rule for 36 years!

Salazar was vehemently anti-communist, a staunch Catholic and authoritarian. He also refused to let go of Portugal’s colonies in Africa even during the post-World-War-II decolonisation period.

During his watch, thousands of opponents were arrested, tortured and killed by the Portuguese secret police. Though quietly backed by the US, American opinion began to exhibit concern when incidents of torture and killings increased.

In 1965, US president, Lyndon B. Johnson, suggested that Salazar introduce some minor reforms. Salazar allowed some political activities and elections, but was able to keep opposition parties at bay through intimidation and arrests.

In 1968, Salzar died from a stroke. But the dictatorship continued and a protégé of his, Marcello Caetano, became the new prime minister. He tried to accelerate some of the political reforms, but then pulled them back after they triggered a few protest rallies.

He then began to reassert Salazar’s authoritarian policies which saw a fresh round of arrests, tortures and killings. Meanwhile, as liberation movements in Portuguese colonies in Africa became violent, more and more young Portuguese men were conscripted in to the army and sent to Africa to fight. Many returned in body bags.

But Caetano refused to grant independence to the colonies. Resentment against this policy began to grow among the junior officers who were serving in Africa. Also, thousands of Portuguese men began to move to other European countries to avoid being conscripted.

In 1972, a group of junior military officers who had served in Africa, formed a clandestine group called the Armed Forces Movement. Most of its members were secret communists. They began to plot a military coup to overthrow the decades-long dictatorship.

Two years later, in 1974, the coup plot was in place. To alert the rebel majors, captains and soldiers, a signal was devised. It was a popular song that was to be played from a radio station.

On April 24, the song was played at midnight, signaling the beginning of the coup. Soldiers and tanks moved in and within six hours they had taken over strategic buildings in the country’s main cities.

The coup was announced on the radio by the coup-makers. Thousands of men, women and children poured out on to the streets and greeted the soldiers. The government collapsed.

A military junta was formed under a sympathetic general. It was to announce widespread socialist reforms and also withdraw Portuguese troops from Africa.

The junta lasted for little more than a year, even though a split occurred in it between radical communists and moderate socialists. The moderates prevailed.

In April 1975 elections were announced and the political parties were allowed to participate freely. Junta leaders withdrew and handed power to the elected representatives.

Pakistan: Fallen horses
Much has been written about the four successful military coups in Pakistan (1958; 1969; 1977 and 1999). But there were at least four more attempts. These ones, however, failed.

Details about the failed attempts have only come out slowly, so much so, that still very little is known about them.

The first such attempt was made in 1951 (against the civilian but semi-democratic regime of Liaquat Ali Khan). The attempt was led by Major-General Akbar Khan.

Akbar Khan had been a hero in Pakistan’s first war against India over the Kashmir issue in 1948. The war had ended in a stalemate after the United Nations (UN) intervened. Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan had accepted the UN’s peace plan.

Akbar Khan was furious. He was an admirer of Turkey’s secular-nationalist and modernist leader, Kamal Ataturk. In 1950, when the outgoing military chief of Pakistan, General Douglas Gracey (a Briton), was handing over the reins of the military to its new chief, Ayub Khan, he told him that Akbar was part of a group of Young Turks in the army and should be watched.

Young Turks was an outfit which Ataturk had belonged to before overthrowing the Ottoman regime in Turkey in the 1920s.

Akbar Khan’s wife was close to the country’s left-wing intelligentsia. She was thus, also on very good terms with the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP).

When Akbar Khan began to talk about a nationalist coup against the Liaquat regime with some sympathetic officers, his wife suggested that the CPP be brought on board as well.

It was through her that Akbar contacted some leading CPP members, who included author and Marxist ideologue, Sajjad Zaheer, and famous Urdu poet and journalist, Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

Though Akbar had insisted that his coup would be nationalistic in essence, he asked the CPP to help him mobilise the masses (through the party’s trade and labour unions). He also agreed to carry out socialist reforms (after the coup).

Twelve military officers, three members of the CPP, and Akbar’s become the core group which was to navigate the coup.

The plan was to take over strategic state and government buildings and the radio stations, with the help of rebel battalions and regiments, and arrest the military chief.

Then Liaquat Ali Khan was to be forced to resign and hand over power to a revolutionary military junta.

But the coup plan collapsed when one of Akbar Khan’s confidants, a police officer, leaked the plan to the government.

Eleven military officers and four civilians were arrested, including Akbar’s wife. The wife was, however, released, but Akbar, along with all other officers and two civilians were given long jail sentences. Sajjad Zaheer was sent back to India from where he had arrived in 1948 to organise the CPP.

The jailed men were released six years later in 1957.

The second such attempt which was foiled was made in 1973 against the government of Z A. Bhutto.

Bhutto’s left-leaning and populist Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) had come to power in December 1971 after East Pakistan separated and became an independent country. The PPP had swept the 1970 elections in West Pakistan.

The coup plan was hatched by a group of officers who had actually paved the way for Bhutto to come to power. After a vicious civil war between the Pakistan army and militant Bengali nationalists saw East Pakistan become Bangladesh, these officers forced the end of the Yahya Khan dictatorship.

They asked the general to resign and hand over power to Bhutto, unless he wanted to be removed by an officer’s coup. Yahya resigned.

However, weary of ‘activist officers,’ the Bhutto regime began to systematically remove them from the scene by dismissing them.

Enraged by the ploy, and believing that officers who had been weak and corrupt during the East Pakistan war were being retained, the rebel group began to plot a coup d’etat against Bhutto with the help of sympathetic officers and soldiers.

One of the leading plotters was Brigadier F B. Ali. He had originally been a Bhutto supporter, and one of the officers who had forced Yahya to resign.

He turned against the Bhutto regime after it began to dismiss many of his colleagues. In 1972, the regime dismissed him from the army as well.

Noticing that the regime’s actions had created resentment among many officers, Brig. Ali, along with Major Farouk Adam Khan, Squadron Leader Ghous, Colonel Aleem Afridi and Lt. Colonel Tariq Rafi began plotting a coup to oust Bhutto.

It is not known what sort of a government they were planning to install as a replacement, but evidence has surfaced suggesting that they were looking to set up a revolutionary military junta populated by officers who would also see the removal of the generals elevated by Bhutto.

Colonel Afridi quietly backed out from the plan and then informed the military’s top leadership about it. The conspirators were arrested, court martialed and jailed.

Ironically, the court martial proceedings were conducted by a junior general called Ziaul Haq.

Four years later, he was made the army chief by Bhutto. In July 1977, he toppled Bhutto in a military coup.

The next failed coup attempt came in 1980. This was against the reactionary Ziaul Haq dictatorship which itself was established through a 1977 military coup.

This attempt was led by Tajammul Hussain Malik, a two-star general in the Pakistan army.

One of the few heroes to emerge from the 1971 East Pakistan debacle, Malik was forcefully retired in 1973 by a military tribunal headed by Ziaul Haq during the trial against officers who had attempted a coup against the ZA Bhutto regime.

Though it is believed that Malik was not directly involved in the 1973 plot, after being forcefully retired, he did plot a coup four years later against the then floundering Bhutto regime in June 1977.

The coup plan was aborted when Malik could not gather enough support from serving officers. A month later, Zia toppled Bhutto and declared martial law.

Also read: Getting up close and personal to a military coup

Malik, however, returned to the scene in 1980, this time to plot a coup against the Zia regime. He managed to bag the backing of some senior officers, including his son, and planned to assassinate Zia during the Pakistan Republic Day parade on March 23, 1980.

The plan was to eradicate Zia and install a radical military junta which would replace Zia’s ‘fake Islamic regime’ with ‘a genuine one.’ It is not known what a ‘genuine Islamic regime’ meant to the plotters.

However, the plot was leaked shortly before going into implementation, and the plotters were all arrested. They were given stern jail sentences, including life imprisonment. They were released in 1988 after the demise of Ziaul Haq and the election of Benazir Bhutto as prime minister.

Four years later, in 1984, Zia faced another coup attempt. This time it came from the left. The plot had its roots in 1982 in Lahore when two majors in the Pakistan army, one (of them Major Aftab), met with lawyer, philosopher and Marxist ideologue, Raza Kazim at his residence.

Kazim had been in jail a year before for authoring a pamphlet against Ziaul Haq. The majors began expressing their disgruntlement towards the Zia regime, but did not inform him that they were planning to organise a coup against him.

The majors, along with a member of the Pakistan progressive intelligentsia, Ali Mehmood, continued to secretly meet Raza. He was also contacted by Mustafa Khar, a former minister in the ZA Bhutto regime (1971-77), and a senior member of the PPP. He had flown into exile to the UK after Zia’s 1977 coup.

Khar informed Kazim that the majors could be trusted and requested him to help them bring down Zia. Kazim was asked (by the majors) to talk to some other anti-Zia officers about history, philosophy and politics.

In late 1982, Khar and Major Aftab told Kazim that they were collecting funds to organise exiled Pakistani activists in the UK. They told him that the money would also be used to whip up protests against the Zia dictatorship in Pakistan.

Kazim was a successful lawyer, and he agreed to hand them Rs. 20,000. In total, he gave the plotters over Rs. 90,000. This is when he was eventually told that all this was being done to plan a coup d’etat against the Zia regime.

Decades later, Kazim told the Pakistan monthly magazine, Herald, that the plotters were planning to topple Zia and establish a populist military regime (headed by Major Aftab).

Khar had suggested to the plotters that Kazim be given an important post in the new regime and be made its main ideologue.

But the plotters suddenly discontinued their interaction with Kazim. He was already having second thoughts about the whole plan because he thought Major Aftab was a megalomaniac who saw himself as being some sort of a messiah.

It was only a year later, in 1984, that Kazim realised that the coup had been planned but was nipped in the bud by military spooks. All the conspirators were arrested, including Kazim. Khar was still in the UK.

They were all given heavy jail sentences, but were released in 1988 by the first Benazir Bhutto regime.

It is not known exactly how the plotters had planned to pull off the coup and how many officers were involved. But according to Kazim, over 500 military officers and soldiers were interrogated.

The last of the failed coup attempts was made in 1995 against the second Benazir Bhutto regime. It included a group of officers who were close to the Zia regime which had folded in 1988 after his demise.

Zia’s appointees in the military had been suspicious of Benazir even when her party had won the first post-Zia election in 1988. They feared that her regime would rollback Pakistan’s nuclear program and Zia’s ‘Islamisation’ policies.

Fears of this nature grew when she returned as PM in 1993. In 1995, Brig. Zaheer Abbasi, Brigadier Mustansir Billa and Qari Saifullah were arrested by the military high command and accused of planning to pull down the Benazir government through a coup d’detat.

The officers were allegedly planning to launch a coup against what they believed was a ‘liberal and corrupt regime’ out to rollback Pakistan’s nuclear program and neutralise Zia’s Islamisation project.

After the coup, they planned to impose a strict Islamic set-up and dismiss the then military chief, General Abdul Waheed Kakar.

It was actually Gen. Kakar who first discovered the plot through military intelligence. He got the plotters arrested and informed PM Bhutto.

The military spooks told Karkar that the mentioned officers were planning to launch a military coup against him and Benazir in collusion with a militant religious outfit; and that they had planned to assassinate her and dismiss him.

The alleged conspirators were given verifying jail sentences.

Source: Men on horseback: A century of coups
Published in Dawn, July 21st, 2016.

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The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion !

Smokers’ Corner: Future of coups

I was surprised to read tweets posted by some experienced Pakistani TV talk-show hosts during the initial eruption of a coup attempt in Turkey last Saturday. They were convinced that the coup had been a success, when even a casual student of military putsches would have been able to detect the chaotic nature of the attempt.

But, of course, as we have often seen, not the most informed and insightful men and women usually occupy anchors’ seats on local news channels.

As a response to the failed coup, PTI chairman Imran Khan claimed that a military coup in Pakistan will be welcomed by the people, unlike the one in Turkey which was neutralised by large sections of the public.

According to him, Erdogan and Nawaz Sharif regimes are authoritarian. Indeed, Erdogan has become increasingly authoritarian, but the Sharif regime is anything but. It is nothing like the government headed by Erdogan.

Is Imran Khan correct in pointing out that a military coup against the Sharif regime will actually be greeted by applause?
Erdogan has managed to become what he has become (a perpetual civilian dictator) largely due to building a strong legacy for himself of being an economic miracle worker.

By winning multiple elections ever since 2002, he solidified his regime’s social contract with a large and diverse section of the Turkish electorate, which, in turn, helped him neutralise the tradition of political interference by Turkey’s armed forces.

While the economic successes and the building of a democratic bond with a wide spectrum of the Turkish society have been triumphs of civilian rule under Erdogan, it is these feats which have eventually created a personality cult around him and ironically turned him into an authoritarian figure.

These triumphs have alsocreated a powerful legacy around him which was expressed when thousands of Turks poured out on the streets to halt the coup attempt.

But is Imran correct to point out that a military coup (against the Sharif regime) in Pakistan will actually be greeted by applause?

Indeed, the armed forces are a popular institution in Pakistan. This popularity has actually skyrocketed during the tenure of army chief Gen Raheel — especially because of the way he plunged head-on against various militant and extremist groups who had otherwise operated with near-impunity before the general took over the reins of the military. He has also come across as an ‘incorruptible’ man of action with a capacity to outline and execute well thought-out plans.

However, this alone cannot guarantee a popular coup. First of all, things in this context have dramatically changed after the end of the Cold War in 1991. Western powers which used to regularly back coups in third world countries during the Cold War, do not do so because there is no opposing superpower to deal with anymore.

One of the most important factors which can generate a successful coup in the post-Cold War scenario is that coups now need widespread public support. But such support without the economic and political backing of developed countries is of little use.

Take the coup of Gen Sisi in Egypt. It was pulled off after thousands of Egyptians demonstrated against the elected government of Muhammad Morsi (of the Muslim Brotherhood party).

Yet, as John Espotiso pointed out in his 2016 book, Islam and Democracy After The Arab Spring, the coup was not welcomed by the either the US or European nations.

Espotiso mentions how crowds, which were celebrating Morsi’s fall, burned effigies and pictures of the American ambassador to Egypt, Anne Paterson. She had vehemently denounced the coup and was dubbed ‘Muslim Brotherhood’s lackey’ by Sisi’s supporters. Eventually, the rise of ISIS, helped Sisi finally gain the backing of the US. Had this backing not come, Sisi could not have survived.

In the notorious 1968 book, Coup D’etat: A Practical Handbook, political scientist, Edward N. Luttwak, wrote that a coup (even if successful) is bound to collapse if it fails to get the backing of developed countries. But today, such countries are in no mood (or condition) anymore to back military coups.

But coups just don’t happen. And the truth is, most of them fail. After studying a variety of coups in South America, Asia and Africa, Luttwak suggested that military coups are only successful in certain conditions.

He wrote that there has to be significant ‘economic backwardness’ in a country. This way the coup-makers can come in after promising to eradicate economic disparities and thus draw support from the large number of people kept away from the economic benefits of the few.

However, Luttwak added that on most occasions, such a coup is launched to stem a possible revolution from below and restore a more acceptable version of the status quo.

Luttwak stated that coups can never be successful if not backed by foreign allies which are also donor countries, funding the economies and the military of the country where the coup is taking place. He wrote that a coup without such backing will be a failure.

He then extends this by pointing out that much of the investment in economically backward countries also comes from large corporations owned by developed countries.

These corporations, apart from expanding their economic interests in the country, also invest in its infrastructure by building schools, hospitals, roads, etc. The opinion of such companies too needs to be taken into account by the coup-makers. If the corporations disagree with the ideas of the coup-makers, they might withdraw their operations from the country and leave it on the brink of an economic collapse.

No wonder then that both the Pakistani civilian and military leadership are trying to gain influence in matters of the China-backed multi-billion-dollar CPEC project.

Luttwak suggests that a coup is most likely successful in a third world country where there is ‘organic unity.’ By this he meant that a single ethnic and lingual group is in a majority. If such a country has multiple ethnic or tribal groups, then the coup-makers will have to identify with the most powerful group.

He warns however that coups undertaken by overpowering and then co-opting a dominant ethnic group will always lead to bitter opposition from other groups, thus threatening perpetual instability.

But in this supposed anti-coup era, why was a coup successful in Egypt and not in Turkey?

Luttwak wrote that coups are almost impossible in developed countries because a functional democratic system here manages to construct a complex but solid relationship (based on economic interests) between the people and the government/state.

Thus, a coup (or a revolution) in such conditions would be seen as a threat to the arrangement which is economically beneficial to a large number of people. The coup will thus be resisted.

Turkey has managed to develop such an arrangement, even though it is still a pale reflection of the one which exists in Europe and the United States. Egypt on the other hand never had any democracy. Its only experiment failed to even begin constructing the above-mentioned arrangement.

Instead, this arrangement in Egypt is still between military-backed civilian dictatorships and large sections of Egyptian society. Morsi was a threat to it. This threat was neutralised by Sisi’s coup which was why it was also largely popular.

What about Pakistan? Compared to most Muslim countries (except Turkey), Pakistan now has had one of the longest democratic traditions. So much so that over the last few decades, its two major parties, the PPP (in Sindh), and the PML-N (in the Punjab), have somewhat managed to create a strong arrangement in which the economic interests of large sections the electorate are identified with these two parties.

A coup here will have to overcome and then assimilate this arrangement, a task easier said than done. Also, China would want a fine balance between civilian rule and Pakistan’s powerful military; and in case of a coup (or any other form of turmoil), China just might pull the plug on its massive CPEC project in Pakistan.

Source: Smokers’ Corner: Future of coups
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, July 24th, 2016

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The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion !

Karachi: What’s in a picture?

A 19th-century sketch of Greek commander, Nearchus, leading his fleet across River Indus in the present-day Sindh province of Pakistan.

Nearchus was a commander in ancient Greek king, Alexander’s army which had invaded India. In 325 BC, Nearchus exited India with his section of the army by sailing over the Indus and exiting from Balochistan.

He entered Balochistan by first reaching the mouth of Indus which emptied the river’s waters in the Arabian Sea. Historians believe this was where the coastal Manora area is in Karachi today.

A great storm from raging and Nearchus found a fishing village here led by a matriarch. He named the place Morontobara (Greek for Woman’s Harbour).

Source: The Voyage of Nearchus from the Indus to the Euphrates: William Vincent (Nabu Press, 2011).
Karachi in the Mirror of History: M Usman Damohi (Al-Abbas Publications, 2011).


At the time, Karachi was just an insignificant dot on world maps. It was a small fishing town ruled by the Sindhi-Baloch dynasty (the Talpurs). It had a fort made of dry mud and an underdeveloped harbour. The town had no paved roads and no sanitation or garbage-collecting system.

It had a population of about 20,000 people who were mostly involved in the fish trade. Crime was high, and disease was rampant. The bulk of the population was made up of Sindhi, Balochi and Gujarati-speaking Hindus and Muslims.

Source:
Gazetteer of the Province of Sind. B Volume 1 Karachi District 1919.

The city’s worsening sanitation conditions fed the infected rats which arrived on ships from elsewhere in India. Hundreds of people perished from the plague. The British began work on providing the city with an effective sanitation and sewerage system.

Source:
Gazetteer of the Province of Sindh. B Volume 1 Karachi District 1919.

By the mid-1900s, Karachi had grown into an impressive trading post. The British developed Karachi’s harbour and it became one of the busiest in India. The British also built a robust infrastructure (roads, bridges, hospitals, parks, railways, etc.); and introduced modern policing and city governing systems.

The crime rate saw a sharp decline; and the city’s economy boomed. Fifty-one per cent of the city’s population was Hindu; 40 per cent was Muslim; and there were also large Christian and Zoroastrian communities.

There was a Jew community too, apart from thousands of British officers, doctors, engineers and administrators and their families residing here. It was during this period that Karachi became known as ‘the Paris of Asia’.

Source:
Gazetteer of the Province of Sind. B Volume 1 Karachi District 1919.

The statue was shipped all the way from London. The ceremony was attended by British and local officials of the city government, British military personnel, Karachi’s wealthy Hindu, Muslim and Zoroastrian dignitaries and the general public.

A few years later, a statue of King Edward, too, was placed here. Both the statues remained in place when Karachi became a part of Pakistan in 1947. However, the statues were removed in 1956 when Pakistan’s first constitution declared the country a republic.


Karachi became the capital of Pakistan in August 1947. It witnessed a huge influx of Muslim refugees arriving from various Indian cities and towns. Karachi did not have the resources to accommodate such an influx. Many of its buildings were packed to capacity. Many civil servants, police personnel and ministers of the new country shifted to these tents from where (for almost a year and a half) they navigated the fate of Pakistan and its capital city.

Source:
Pakistan’s Capital (A feature in LIFE Magazine’s June, 1948 issue).


The city began to recover from the early demographic tremors caused by the dramatic influx of refugees when Karachi became the capital of Pakistan.

Another reason for the recovery was the sudden boom that the city’s economy enjoyed when Pakistan became a leading exporter of jute, cotton and other agricultural goods to the US troops stationed in Korea during the Korean War. The bulk of the goods were exported through cargo ships leaving from the city’s harbour.

The brief economic boom that the city enjoyed (see previous picture and text), facilitated the government to erect some much needed buildings to house the growing number of government officials and refugees (Urdu-speaking Mohajirs).

In the early 1950s, a bulk of the city’s labour force was made up of the working-class sections of the refugees. By the late 1950s, much of the force comprised Pakhtun migrants arriving from the NWFP province (present-day Khyber Pakhtunkhwa).

The constitution declared the country a republic and promised Pakistan’s first election based on adult franchise. Assembly members were all indirectly elected, and consisted of legislators from the centre-right Muslim League, the centrist Republican Party and the left-leaning Awami League.

The assembly also consisted a few members from the left-wing Azad Pakistan Party. An alliance of centre-left outfits called the United Front had the second largest number of members in the assembly after Muslim League. The assembly did not have any member to form a religious party, even though the small Nizam-e-Islam Party (based in East Pakistan) was part of the United Front.



1957: Mohajir street actors re-enact scenes of violence during the partition of India and which forced many of them to migrate to Karachi.

Most such plays were staged on the streets of the refugee camps which were still existing till the late 1950s. Crime, exploitation and a sense of alienation were ripe in the camps. They were emphatically depicted by famous Urdu novelist Shaukat Siddique in his 1956 novel, Khuda Ki Basti (God’s Abode).



1958: American tourists enjoying a sunny day at one of the many beaches of Karachi. ‘Huts’ had begun to come up at these beaches to accommodate the increasing number of visitors to these beaches.

According to a 1957 newspaper article in America’s Washington Post, Karachi’s beaches were some of the ‘cleanest beaches in Asia’. Tiny working-class settlements (gohts) near these beaches began to expand.

The settlements were largely populated by Sindhi and Baloch fishermen and their families. They slowly began to venture into other areas of business as well, such as selling beer, soft-drinks and snacks to passing visitors, become caretakers of the huts, and invest in buying horses and camels to provide joy rides to bathers.

Pakistan military chief, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, had come to power through a military coup. He ordered a crackdown against corruption and crime in Karachi which had grown ever since the city’s economy had begun to struggle from the mid-1950s onward.
The Ayub regime had made Karachi the focus of its rapid industrialisation project.


Karachi’s Burns Road area in 1961. The area, first developed as a ‘posh’ locality by the British, had become a middle-class neighbourhood in the 1960s, largely populated by Mohajirs.

Restaurants and eateries offering spicy North Indian dishes had begun to come up here and by the 1970s, the area would become a famous ‘food street’ — but highly populated and congested. By the 1980s, though it remained famous for its eateries, it was mostly populated by lower-middle-class segments of Karachi.



Karachi’s McLeod Road in 1962. After the economic boom and rapid industrialisation witnessed during the first half of the Ayub regime, McLeod Road became to be known as the ‘Wall Street of Pakistan’.

New buildings housing the Karachi Stock Exchange, banks, insurance companies, newspaper offices, other financial institutions and advertising agencies sprang up.

Between 1959 and 1965, streets of this area were regularly washed with water. Later, the area was renamed I.I. Chundrigar Road and has become extremely congested and polluted.



A Pakhtun rickshaw driver in Karachi’s Clifton area in 1963. The economic and building boom witnessed during the first phase of the Ayub regime saw the influx of labour arriving in Karachi from Pakistan’s NWFP province.

The hard-working Pakhtuns immediately populated the city’s labour force and also began to operate businesses involved in providing public transport. However, tensions began to mount between the city’s Mohajir majority and the new Pakhtun arrivals. The city eventually witnessed its first Mohajir-Pashtun riot in 1965.

Ayub Khan (Muslim League-Convention) defeated Fatima Jinnah (of Combined Opposition Parties — an alliance of anti-Ayub left and right outfits) and was re-elected as President. However, Karachi was the only city which voted against Ayub.

In the 1960s, PIA rapidly emerged as one of the top airlines in the world and the Karachi Airport became ‘the gateway to Asia’.

It was a popular high-end hotel in a city enjoying an economic boom and a rising number of foreign dignitaries, business personnel and tourists arriving for work and play to Karachi.

The hotel was re-named Pearl Continental in the 1990s. It is now mostly surrounded by tall barricades and security guards due to rise of terrorism and militancy in the city from 2004 onward.


The community had grown in size in the early 1900s, but began to shrink from the 1950s onward. By the 1960s, only a handful of Jews remained in Karachi. They completely vanished after late 1960s (moving abroad).

Members of Karachi’s Jew community spoke fluent Hebrew, English, Urdu and even some Arabic.

Source:
Pakistan’s Lost Jews: Rumana Hussain (Newsline, December 2013).



A widespread slum in Karachi in 1968.

The Ayub regime’s industrialisation project and pro-business policies had triggered an economic boom. But this boom had a flip side to it as well.

It also created serve economic disparities and gaps between classes and the expansion of slums like this one. The slums did not have any running water, sewerage system or electricity and were riddled with poverty, rising crime and alcoholism.

These tensions were expressed by an intense anti-Ayub movement in 1968-69, largely orchestrated by left-wing student outfits, labour unions and populist political parties. The movement forced Ayub to resign in early 1969.

The populist ZA Bhutto regime, which took power in December 1971, would go on to ‘regularise’ most of Karachi’s slums by providing them with some amenities, and ownership of land to those residing here. The Bhutto regime would also go on to build walls around such slums to stem their physical growth.



A 1970 Pakistani passport.

Though the Pakistani passport was always green (ever since the country’s creation in 1947), the full name of the country inscribed on it kept changing.

From 1947 till 1955, ‘Pakistan Passport’ was inscribed (in Urdu, Bengali and English) on the cover. This was changed to ‘Republic of Pakistan’ in 1956, and then to ‘Islamic Republic of Pakistan’ in 1958.

In 1960, the Ayub regime reverted it to ‘Republic of Pakistan. In 1969, the inscription was changed back to the simple ‘Pakistan Passport’. This was changed in 1973 to ‘Islamic Republic of Pakistan’ by the Bhutto regime (now written only in Urdu and English, because the Bengali-dominated East Pakistan had broken away in 1971).

This has remained, even though the Musharraf regime (1999-2008) did try to revert the inscription back to ‘Republic of Pakistan’, but his move was opposed by conservative opposition parties.



A 1973 photograph of a pop band playing at a nightclub in Karachi.

A majority of such bands, which played regularly at hotels and nightclubs of the city, consisted of members of Karachi’s vibrant Christian community. The community was largely Catholic and its ancestors had begun to arrive in Karachi in the early 1900s. Most had come from Goa where they had been converted to Christianity by Portuguese colonialists.

Karachi’s Christian community largely resided in the Saddar areas and was involved in education. The late 1960s and 1970s were the heydays of Christian pop bands, and most Christian youth made their living through this.

However, after nightclubs were closed down in April 1977 and a reactionary dictatorship came to power in July 1977, such bands struggled to find work. Many from these bands slipped into depression and alcoholism and died young, or migrated abroad. By the 1990s and 2000s, a majority of Karachi’s Christians had migrated.

—Picture courtesy: LMKonline.



McLeod Road in 1975.

Though it was still being called the ‘Wall Street of Pakistan’, the economy of the country which had boomed in the early and mid-1960s had already begun to falter.

Major industries and capital, which were concentrated in private hands, began to take flight and were stashed abroad after the Bhutto regime implemented its ‘socialist’ policies.

Most banks and insurance companies situated on this road were nationalised and fell into disarray. The economy also struggled to come to terms with the dramatic rise in global oil prices.



A 1975 poster of a Karachi-based pop band.

The 1970s were a surreal and flamboyant era in the city. Exaggerated and extroverted displays of one’s personality was common among the youth.



Bhutto inaugurates Pakistan’s first nuclear-power plant in Karachi in 1972. Bhutto accelerated Pakistan’s nuclear program in 1974 after India tested its first nuclear device. By the 1980s, Pakistan had developed its own nuclear device which it tested a decade later in 1998.

The plant which Bhutto inaugurated in Karachi is still operational.



Karachi’s famous Nishat Cinema in 1974.

It thrived in the 1970s and even survived the impact of the VCR invasion in the 1980s. However, in the 2000s, it was completely destroyed and set on fire by militant mobs incited by religious outfits. It has not been reconstructed.



Karachi’s busy Saddar area in 1974.

It had been an upscale shopping area during British Raj. From the mid-1960s, it began evolving as the epicentre of Karachi’s nightlife.

Its streets were lined with trendy restaurants, shops, bars and nightclubs, mostly catering to Karachi’s middle-classes. By the 1980s, it began to fall into disarray and suffer severe congestion. Today, it is a pale and an ill reflection of what it used to be.



Fishermen catch hammerhead sharks in Karachi’s coastal area in 1976.

Karachi always had a prominent fishing industry (fisheries), and it still does. However, ironically, it is perhaps the only major coastal city in the world where seafood is not all that popular.

Though small seafood eateries thrive near the port, and in the city’s historical coastal areas, such as Kemari, exclusive seafood restaurants are rare in Karachi.

This is mostly due to the fact that after the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the majority group of the city was made up of refugees arriving from various cities and towns of India. Many of these cities and towns were landlocked and never fully developed a taste for seafood.



Children enjoy a ride at a slum in Karachi in 1977.

The Bhutto regime ‘regularised’ many such slums by providing their residents land ownership and some amenities. Bhutto also got walls built around the slums to stem their growth, but the increasing rate of population in Karachi, inflation, and unemployment, could not stem swelling of poverty and economic desperation.

Criminal gangs dealing in drugs (mostly hashish), prostitution, pick-pocketing, gambling and black marketing grew two-fold in such slums, one of which was situated in the Lyari area. Paradoxically, Lyari had become a bastion of Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) from 1970 onward.



PIA airhostesses receiving lessons in English and French in Karachi in 1975.

PIA continued to grow into a world-class airline, and was making handsome profits since the mid-1960s. Karachi Airport, too, remained one of the busiest in the region, accommodating flights belonging to all the leading airlines of the world. But from the late 1980s onwards, PIA began to face a gradual decline. Its quality of service deteriorated and by the 2000s, it was on the verge of bankruptcy. It still is.

The airport in Karachi, too, lost out its ‘gateway to Asia’ status to Dubai. And due to rising incidents of terrorism in Pakistan, traffic at the airport was drastically reduced, despite the fact that the airport was shifted to a brand new building in 1992.



The incomplete building of what was supposed to be one of the largest 5-star hotels in Asia.

With rising violence in Beirut in the mid-1970s, the Bhutto regime planned to divert the wealthy European and Arab tourists from the crumbling casinos of Beirut to Karachi. For this purpose, the Bhutto government began building a large 5-star hotel in the heart of Karachi (Hayat Hotel), and an equally large casino situated on the shoes of the city’s Clifton Beach area.

By 1977 both the buildings were almost complete when Bhutto was overthrown in a reactionary military coup. Work on the hotel and the casino was halted. The empty casino building was finally torn down in the 2000s, whereas the incomplete structure of the hotel still stands, rather aimlessly.

The ‘recreational’ wealth Bhutto was trying to attract to Karachi eventually moved to Dubai.



The 5-star Taj Mahal Hotel on Karachi’s Shara-e-Faisal in 1981.

Its appearance symbolised a brief respite from economic turmoil which the city had fallen into in the late 1970s. The Ziaul Haq dictatorship was replenished with US and Saudi aid (at the start of the Afghan Civil War), and it also began to dismantle Bhutto’s rather ill-formed ‘socialist’ economic policies.

A new class of nouveau-riche began to emerge, which was comfortable with combining the accumulation of wealth and material exuberance with exhibitions of public piety encouraged by the Zia dictatorship.

Many members of this new class could be found holding business lunches and dinners at the Taj Mahal. The hotel still exists but in a more depleted state. It is now called the Regent Plaza and has become a 2-star resort.



Karachi’s Seaview Area begins to emerge in 1982.

Much of this area, located along the Clifton Beach, had just been about the sea, sand and shrubs. But in the early 1980s, town-houses and small bungalows began to come up, mostly catering to the growing middle-class sections of Karachi.

Today, it has become a widespread residential area with shopping malls, exotic restaurants and tall office buildings. However, the sea water here has become extremely polluted.



Prince Karim Agha Khan being given a tour of the Agha Khan Hospital in 1983.

Funded by the prince, the hospital has remained Karachi’s largest and most sophisticated surgical and treatment facility. It also has an excellent medical university attached to it.



Two photos of the same street in one of Karachi’s largest impoverished areas, Orangi. The pictures were taken by famous architect and sociologist Arif Hassan to demonstrate the success of the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP).

The first picture is from 1983 and second from 1984. OPP was an initiative of Akhtar Hameed Khan, a social scientist. He began a ‘bottom up community development program’ in Orangi which, at the time, was a large slum.

He registered the OPP as an NGO and then generated funds and plans for the upliftment of Orangi. He mobilised the area’s people and involved them in various self-help schemes aimed at building an effective sewerage and sanitation system, paved streets, low-income housing, schools and medical facilities.

He often got into tussles with the many land-grabbing, extortion and drug gangs operating here. The gangs utilised the area’s religious figures to intimidate him. But the OPP was a huge success.



Pakistan and India battle it out in the 1981 Champions Trophy at the Hockey Club of Pakistan (HCP).

The HCP is a state-of-the-art hockey stadium and headquarters of Pakistan’s hockey federation. Situated off Shara-e-Faisal Road in Karachi, it was inaugurated in 1979 and was the first hockey ground in the country to have an Astroturf field.

The HCP held various international tournaments between 1980 and 1992. Most of them were won by Pakistan which was a force in international field hockey between the 1960s and early 1990s. Pakistan’s fortunes, in this respect, began to plummet after 1994, so much so that by the 2000s, this once international hockey power and winner of three hockey World Cups was even struggling to qualify for the sport’s major events. The HCP stopped holding international events. The last major event here was actually a pop concert in 1995.



1985: School and college students chant slogans against the government and Karachi’s ‘transport mafia’ the day after a Mohajir student, Bushra Zaidi, was run over by a bus.

The accident sparked a series of deadly riots between the Mohajirs and the Pakhtuns of Karachi.

Hundreds of people lost their lives. These riots triggered a cycle of ethnic conflicts which became an uncomfortable norm in the city. The riots were initially the result of Karachi’s resources coming under great stress due to the unchecked influx of Afghan refugees.

Drug and land-grabbing mafias became interwoven with corrupt security personnel and some politicians and guns became easily available on the black market. This was also the start of ethnic ghettoisation in Karachi, in which ethnic communities began residing in areas mostly populated by their respective ethnic group.



Crew of the first ever Emirates Airline flight to Pakistan in 1985.

The flight arrived from Dubai to Karachi. Emirates, which would go on to become one of the leading airlines in the world, was initially set up by the UAE government with the help of engineers, pilots and administrators belonging to Pakistan’s national airline, PIA.

Ironically, from the late 1980s, as Emirates was beginning its gradual rise, PIA had already begun its eventual decline.



Members of Airport Security Guard posted near an American Pan Am plane on the runway of the Karachi Airport in 1986.

The plane, which was scheduled to take-off from Karachi to JFK Airport in New York (via Frankfurt), was stormed by four radical Palestinian militants belonging to the notorious Marxist Abu Nidal group. The militants had entered the plane dressed as security personnel.

They shot dead an airhostess before Pakistani army commandos entered the plane in the dead of the night. Twenty passengers lost their lives in the gun fight between the commandos and the militants. The dead included Indian, Mexican, American and Pakistani passengers. The militants were captured alive.



Master West Indian batsman, Viv Richards, hitting out against Pakistan at Karachi’s National Stadium during the 1987 Cricket World Cup.

The 1987 World Cup was the first major cricket tournament held in Pakistan (jointly held with India). Both Pakistan and India reached the semi-finals of the event but lost. Australia beat England in the final to win its first cricket World Cup trophy. It would go on to win it four more times!

The National Stadium had a history of crowd trouble. But when in 1987, the stadium was upgraded and a roof constructed over the general stands (to keep out the angry Karachi sun), incidents of pitch invasion and crowd violence decreased dramatically.



Karachi-based pop/rock band, Milestones. Formed in 1990, it went on to become part of a fresh wave of Pakistani pop music which swept the country in the 1990s.



Heroin addiction shot up dramatically in Pakistan in the 1980s.

The most severely hit city was Karachi. Heroin addiction was almost non-existent in Karachi till 1979. But by the end of the 1980s, Karachi had one of the largest number of addicts in Pakistan, numbering in millions.

Heroin first began proliferating in the metropolis when it was introduced by drug peddlers, who had accompanied Afghan refugees arriving in Karachi after the start of the Afghan Civil War in December 1979. Peddlers first handed out the drug free of cost calling it ‘meethi chars’ (sweet hashish).

Users were not told it was physically addictive. But once the users were hooked, the peddlers began to charge them. Growth in drug addiction also led to more violent drug gangs and crime among addicts who soon ran out of money to satisfy their addiction.

The heroin menace cut across classes. In the late 1990s, when the price of heroin became even steeper, most addicts began to inject it. This led to the spread of diseases such as AIDs and fatal forms of hepatitis. Karachi still suffers from a major heroin problem.

Source:
The detoxification of high dose heroin addicts in Pakistan: Micheal Goossop (1989)



A market in Karachi shut-down due to a strike in 1993.

When the state and government launched an operation against the alleged ‘militant wings’ of the city’s largest party, the MQM, strikes became common in Karachi.

Throughout the 1990s, strikes shut down businesses and Karachi’s economy and law and order situation deteriorated drastically. Hundreds of policemen and members of the MQM died in the conflict.



Indian actor Shashi Kapoor and British actor Christopher Lee shooting a scene in Karachi in 1997.

The scene was for the biopic of Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah.



England cricketer McDermott Reeves enjoys a camel ride in Karachi.

Reed was part of the England cricket squad which toured Pakistan in 2000 for Test and ODI series.



The first major terror attack in Karachi by extremist outfits took place in 2002.

A bus carrying French engineers was targeted, killing many.



The same year (2002) suicide bombers belonging to an extremist outfit targeted the US Embassy in Karachi near Hotel Marriot.

Dozens of bystanders were killed. The Musharraf regime acknowledged that a new form of terror and violence has struck Pakistan.



A middle-class couple in Karachi, 2004.

The Musharraf regime greatly liberalised the economy and offered easy loans. The urban middle-classes benefited from this and their ranks grew rapidly.

But just as had happened during the Ayub regime, this time too, an economic boom had a flip side. Apart from giving more consumption powers to the urban middle-classes, it further widened economic disparities as well.



A vicious storm lashes Karachi in 2006.

The year’s monsoon in the city was extraordinarily harsh, causing severe urban flooding and deaths. The monsoon season in Karachi is normally very mild. But after every five years or so, Karachi receives heavy rains from ‘cloud bursts’.

Weather experts suggest that heavy monsoons in Karachi are not a norm because monsoon rains in the city are ‘mainly due to meteorological accidents’. By this they mean that heavy rains only occur in Karachi due to some unexpected weather conditions in the Arabian Sea or over the Gujarat province in neighbouring India.

The 2006 rains broke various previous records. They were compared to the record rains Karachi had received during the monsoon seasons of 1901,1967, 1976-77 and 1994.



2007 was particularly violent for Karachi. Terrorist attacks on civilians and security forces by clandestine extremist outfits increased twofold, and clashes between supporters of the Musharraf regime and opponents led to many deaths.

Karachi’s economy, which had enjoyed a brief boom in the early 2000s, had begun to buckle.

For the next many years, crime in the city would rise to unprecedented levels, forcing the military, the federal government (now led by Nawaz Sharif’s centre-right PML-N), and Sindh’s PPP-led provincial regime to initiate an extensive operation against terrorists and criminal gangs.



Karachi’s Seaview area near the Clifton Beach in 2015. Till the late 1970s, the area was a long stretch of sea, sand and shrubs.

Today, it is one of the most thriving residential, commercial and recreational areas of Karachi.



Body of a whale washed ashore the Clifton Beach. The hectic building boom along the Clifton Beach has severely polluted the sea waters here.



Karachi’s largest multiplex cinema, The Nueplex.

Multiplex cinemas mushroomed across the city from the mid-2000s onward. As conventional cinemas went out of fashion, multiplexes have been enjoying the return of middle-class audiences to watch films on the big screen.



Karachi’s Prince Cinema today. Built in 1977, it was the country’s largest cinema and the first one which had a 70mm screen, and Dolby sound system.

It was also the most expensive. However, decades later, it has been struggling to come to terms with the challenges posed by multiplexes. It survived the crisis of the 1980s when the VCR made sure to keep audiences seated in their homes, and it also survived when a rabid mob of extremists went on a rampage a few years ago and burned down a number of cinemas (Prince, Bambino, Nishat, Capri).

Nishat never reopened. Such cinemas now squarely cater to working-class audiences who can’t afford tickets at multiplexes.



Karachi (and Pakistan’s) tallest building under-construction.

Called the Icon Tower, it is situated in the New Clifton area of the city (near the famous shrine of Sufi saint, Abdullah Shah Ghazi).

It is going to be 60-stories-high and is expected to be completed by early 2017. So far, the tallest building in Pakistan is Karachi’s MCB Tower on II Chundrigarh Road. Built in the 2000s, it broke the record held by Habib Bank Plaza (also located on the same road). The Habib Bank Plaza (now HBL Plaza) was built in the early 1960s.

Source: Karachi: What’s in a picture?
Published in Dawn, July 29th 2016.

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The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion !

Smokers’ Corner: A coup plot in America

The following article is the concluding piece in our coup trilogy — Men on horseback (July 21, 2016, Dawn.com); Future coups (July 24, 2016, Dawn Magazine).

This piece brings the trilogy to a full circle by investigating an enigmatic coup plot in a country which, during the Cold War, was behind most military putsches: the United States of America.

The US is one of the world’s oldest democracies. Ever since the American Revolution (1765-1783), which overthrew British colonial rule and saw America become a sovereign country, the US developed a rigorous (though, complex) democratic system.

By the early 20th century, this system had managed to withstand and survive various political and economic upheavals. These also included a vicious civil war (1861-1865) which (for four years or so) saw the country break into two competing regions, before the federalist forces restored its reunification.

Thus, in the United States, a military coup was never to be expected, even during the height of the Cold War when putsches where taking place with great frequency across much of Asia, South America, Africa and even in some countries of Europe.

However, though the US political system has largely remained airtight to ever allow any internal military adventurism, fears of a military coup were never entirely missing from the country’s body politic.

At least three prominent films investigated the possibilities and repercussions of a military coup in the US — the world’s largest and most developed nuclear power.

In 1964, two films, Stanley Kubrick’s dark comedy, Dr Strangelove, and John Frankenheimer’s 7 Days in May, both dealt with intransigent US generals attempting coups against presidents who were trying to lower Cold War hostilities with the Soviet Union.

In 1981, director Harold Becker made TAPS in which a group of junior officers take over a military academy after its principal (a former army general) is shot dead by a civilian, and the government decides to close down the academy.

Though the immediate impetus for these films were the dynamics of Cold War politics, and the proliferation of military coups during this war; they were also largely inspired by an enigmatic coup plot which was unearthed and thwarted in the United States in the 1930s.

Over the decades, details of the plot have slowly come to light in the shape of a number of books, especially Jules Archer’s Plot to Seize the White House; Sally Denton’s The Plots against the President; and Hans Schmidt’s Maverick Marine.

After the completion of the two terms of US president, Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), the Republican and Democratic presidents who followed him, focused on running the US by allowing a largely laissez faire form of capitalism which discouraged state/government intervention in economic matters.

The policies in this regard bore fruit because by the 1920s, the US economy grew to become one of the biggest and strongest in the world, even though the gap between the haves and the have-nots was expanding rather drastically.

What’s more, in 1920, as the American economy ballooned and reached great heights, and the country’s ‘enterprising spirit and ingenuity’ became a cause célèbre, the government imposed a ban on alcoholic beverages (prohibition).

This was done to exhibit that the laissez faire model of capitalism encouraged by the government also had a moral dimension. In other words, though minimal state intervention had meant that no programmes to benefit those left behind by the economic system were forthcoming, the social life of the disadvantaged half was to be regulated through some good old-fashioned piety and morality!

The results were surreal: across the 1920s, the economy continued to grow; the rich continued to grow richer; material hedonism gripped the affluent; and crime became rampant when prohibition triggered the emergence of violent mafias dealing in bootleg alcohol. Corruption in the police force too grew two-fold.

And then, the celebrated system just buckled. Minimum state/government intervention in economic matters meant that the government failed to check the more anarchic and self-serving aspects of the system. These triggered an unprecedented crash of the stock market in 1929.

Financial institutions and corporations suddenly went bankrupt; poverty and unemployment levels shot up to unprecedented heights; crime became rampant; and the once haughty government now seemed entirely rudderless.

In 1932, with the economy in a state of complete disarray, and the society on the brink of ruin, Americans elected Franklin D. Roosevelt as president, a Democrat from New York.

Almost immediately, Roosevelt began to dismantle the previous system by erecting weighty state-backed social and economic projects, encouraging an unprecedented exhibition of state-intervention — the kind never seen in the US, and almost socialist in nature. Prohibition was done away with as well.

In his book, John Archer wrote that Roosevelt’s policies created panic among the leading industrialists and businessmen who saw him as a socialist, and even a communist!

A group of industrialists who had made their fortunes under the previous system approached a former US military man, Gen Smedly Butler, who was an American war hero and well respected in the army, as well as among large sections of the public.

He had initially supported Roosevelt’s election, but soon was heard criticising his policies. The industrialists implored him to ‘save the US from communism’ and use his influence over soldiers and serving generals to topple Roosevelt through a military coup.

Gen Butler was to force Roosevelt out with an army of 500,000 war veterans; become Secretary of General Affairs, and take his orders from a core group of at least eight industrial and business tycoons. The industrialists were willing to put up $60 million for the execution of the plan.

One industrialist told Butler: ‘I am willing to offer one half of my fortune to save the other half …’

However, after going along with the plotters, Butler decided to betray the plan when he went public. Shaken by the confession, the government ordered an immediate inquiry.

Butler told the inquiry committee that one of the plotters (a businessman), had travelled to Italy to study the fascist regime of Mussolini. He told Butler that America needed a fascist government to save the nation from the communists who wanted to tear it down and wreck all that they (the industrialists) had built in America. They told him that the only men who have the patriotism to save America are the soldiers, and that Butler was to organise a million men overnight!

Butler also took the names of the plotters. These included owners of well-known American corporations. However, the committee removed the names from its records ‘due to lack of substantive evidence.’

Those named also pushed back and accused Butler of lying. Incensed by the committee’s attitude, Butler became a recluse. Roosevelt, however, went on to be re-elected for three more terms. He passed away in the middle of his fourth term in 1945. His era saw the construction of America’s widespread welfare system which lasted till the late 1970s.

In 1967, journalist John Spivak, managed to get his hands on those sections of the committee’s report which were never made public. These sections conformed that, indeed, a coup plot had been afoot and that it was exposed by Butler.

Butler, however, had died a broken man in 1940.

Source: Smokers’ Corner: A coup plot in America
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, July 31st, 2016

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The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion !

Smokers’ Corner: What are terrorists made of?

According to a recent feature in Scientific America, the US Homeland Department has dished out $12 million to a research facility which investigates the origins, dynamics and psychological impact of terrorism.

The facility, staffed by more than 30 experienced scientists, is called Study of Terrorism & Response to Terrorism (START).

According to Scientific America: “Whereas earlier researchers focused on the political roots of terrorism, many of today’s investigators are probing the psychological factors that drive adherents to commit deadly deeds …”

START is now concentrating on trying to figure out the minds of persons who are willing to cause indiscriminate carnage and maximum deaths (including their own) for what they believe is a cause close to their faith. Such a person does not see it as an act of terror, but, rather, an expression of their theological conviction.

In the past, a majority of studies in this context have been more inclined to treat such men and women as consequences of systematic brainwashing and even mental illness.

Recent studies suggest that terrorist outfits usually tend to screen out mentally unstable recruits and volunteers because their instability is likely to compromise the mission and expose their handlers.
Even though these two factors are still being investigated, the most recent studies on the issue emanating from research facilities such as START suggest that most of the terrorists might actually be mentally stable; even rational.

Summarising the results of the recent studies, Scientific America informs that “the vast majority of terrorists are not mentally ill but are essentially rational people who weigh the costs and benefits of terrorist acts, concluding that terrorism is profitable.”

By profitable they mean an act of terror which, in addition to being financially favourable to the perpetrator (or to his or her family which gets looked after if the person is killed); is also an act which is perceived by the person to be beneficial to his or her sense and perception of their spiritual disposition.

What’s more, recent studies suggest that terrorist outfits usually tend to screen out mentally unstable recruits and volunteers because their instability is likely to compromise the mission and expose their handlers.

The studies also propose that even though economic disadvantages do play a role in pushing a person to join a terror outfit out of anger or desperation, this is not always the case.

Forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman of the University of Pennsylvania, carried out an extensive survey of media reports and court records on 400 ‘extremists.’ He determined that “these individuals were far from being brainwashed, socially isolated, hopeless fighters; 90 per cent of them actually came from caring, intact families; and 63 per cent of these had gone to college.”

There is another interesting query that the researchers are trying to investigate: why were terrorists during the Cold War more constrained in their acts than the ones which emerged after the end of that conflict?

Studies suggest that a majority of significant terror groups during the Cold War were driven by nationalistic or communist impulses. Modern religious terrorism largely emerged from the 1990s onward.

Interestingly, despite the fact that Cold War terrorists did not hesitate to kill perceived enemies, they were, however, overtly conscious of how their acts would be perceived by popular opinion and the media.

For example, militant left-wing outfits in Europe, and even some factions of Palestinian guerrilla organisations (in the late 1960s and 1970s), would often abort attacks in which they feared casualties of innocent bystanders could mount.

This is not the case anymore. It seems, today, the old concern of being perceived as an indiscriminately brutal outfit has actually become the purpose. Terrorists now actually want to be perceived in this manner.

This changing mindset reminds me of a man who once ran a small roadside tea stall a few streets away from the offices of an English weekly I used to work for as a reporter in the early 1990s.

People called him Anju Bhai and he was in his 40s. He was famous for his doodh pati which he used to serve in transparent teacups. But there was something else about him which was far more intriguing.

Long before some young Pakistanis began to pour into Afghanistan to fight in the 1980s, and before men began travelling to Syria, only to return and wanting to destroy the whole concept of society as we know it. Anju Bhai travelled to Egypt to fight in a war against Israel.

Travelling across Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Algeria, he made his way to Egypt on buses. This was during the 1967 Arab-Israel War. Anju Bhai was just 20 and had quit college to go fight against the Israelis.

Anju was a passionate admirer of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, and also equally passionate about the Palestinian cause.

Arab Nationalism was all the rage in those days — a fusion of nationalism, anti-imperialism and socialism. It was also vehemently opposed to conservative Arab monarchies. Nasser was one of its main architects.

The war lasted for just six days. Egypt was decimated and so was the charm and influence of Arab Nationalism. Anju lost four of his fingers when a grenade exploded in his right hand. He was part of a rag-tag brigade mostly made up of Syrian, Algerian and Palestinian volunteers.

A month after the war, Anju joined Yasser Arafat’s PLO. He travelled to a PLO camp in Jordan and got trained in guerrilla warfare. In early 1968, he was selected to join a group of four Palestinians and two Syrians in Beirut.

The group was to attack an Israeli military convoy on a road near the Lebanon-Israel border. But suddenly, three members of the group changed the plan and decided to attack a bus carrying Israeli labourers on the same road. The rest of the group, including Anju, refused, saying they would not target civilians.

Anju told me this split was symptomatic of the major split that would divide Arafat’s PLO in 1974 between Arafat’s faction and the faction headed by the notorious Abu Nidal.

Anju returned to Pakistan in late 1968 — broken and bitter. His father, a cashier at a bank, refused to talk to him. Anju could not complete his education. In 1974, he found employment as a copy-maker at the PPP-backed progressive Urdu monthly, Al-Fatah.

He was still there when the PPP regime was overthrown in the 1977 reactionary coup. Anju remained unemployed till 1980 when one day he borrowed 2,500 rupees from a friend and set up a small tea stall on I.I. Chundrigar Road.

The stall kept him afloat and he got married in 1987. I last met him in 1998. A few years ago I went looking for him again, but was told he had folded his stall in 2001 and had moved to Bahrain with his wife and kids.

Nevertheless, in the context of this piece, I must relate here what he said when once I asked him a pointed question. Being an ‘angry young man’ myself in those days, I had asked him, wasn’t he angry and vengeful towards a society that had rejected him twice and turned his life upside-down?

After listening to my question, a wry smile had cut across his aging face and he just said: “Scene ulta tha, chotay bhai (It was the other way round, little brother). Society ko mein ne reject kiya tha (It was I who had rejected society) …”

Source: Smokers’ Corner: What are terrorists made of?
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, August 7th, 2016

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The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion !

Smokers’ Corner: A matter of belief or evidence?

In her 2005 book, Somanatha, famous Indian historian Romila Thapar wrote that history is a matter of evidence, not belief. She was responding to her critics who were mostly Hindu nationalists. Ever since the 1960s, Thapar has been battling historical scenarios and narratives constructed by the Indian right. She claims that Indian history in textbooks has been derived from ‘communal interpretations’ in which events in the last thousand years are interpreted solely in terms of ‘a notional continual conflict between monolithic Hindu and Muslim communities.’

We have seen the same happening in Pakistan as well. However, from the 1980s onward, a series of historians began to react to the official version of history accusing it of not only being made up of distorted facts, but also encouraging a myopic worldview, further tainted by religious bias and misplaced arrogance.

Historians such as Ayesha Jalal, K.K. Aziz, Dr Mubarak Ali and Rubina Saigol; and educationists/scientists such as A.H. Nayyar, Pervez Hoodbhoy and Ahmad Salim, have written extensively on the issue, warning that the many notions found in Pakistani textbooks (put there to appease the overarching ideological and political status of the state and its right-wing allies), were creating generations of young Pakistanis who will find themselves alienated in a world which does not quite work the way their textbooks tell them.

However, while in Pakistan, much of the criticism and subsequent suggestions made by the aforementioned revisionists, have (slowly and cautiously) begun to make their way into the rhetoric and policies of the state and the government, things in this respect seem to be going from bad to worse in India.

In Pakistan, the criticism and corrective input by scholars has begun to reflect in state rhetoric and policies of the government, while in India, things are going from bad to worse
Indeed, up until the early 2000s, the Pakistani revisionists faced harassment and a string of unsavoury labels from a reactive state and rightest detractors. But today, their theories and findings have begun to find a place in the ongoing discourses within a state and society now attempting to rid themselves of extremist violence and thought.

In India, militant Hindu nationalism has been on the rise for the past two decades or so. But today, it is finally managing to wield the kind of political power and social influence which it was denied in the past.

In an ironic twist, just as attempts are being made in Pakistan to roll back the concoctions and myopic strands found in the old ideological narrative of the state, Cambridge University Press published a hefty book by an Indian historian, Venkat Dhulipala, which goes to great lengths in trying to establish the accuracy of the old narrative.

Perhaps awkwardly conscious of the rise of Hindu militancy in India, Dhulipala was driven to prove that the militancy in his country was a reaction to the militant nature of the old faith-centric narrative in Pakistan?

The irony is that it is Dhulipala’s book which is now being waved and thumped triumphantly by the remnant purveyors of the old narrative in Pakistan.

I don’t know what Dhulipala thinks about the ideological narrative which the Hindu nationalists are trying to weave into Indian textbooks, but he certainly is not a revisionist. In India, revisionist historians are under attack like never before. One of Romila Thapar’s textbooks which was introduced in Indian schools in the 1960s, was recently removed from the curriculum by the current BJP government. The book was replaced by one authored by Meenakshi Jain, a political scientist who has been a vocal supporter of Hindu nationalism.

Jain has accused Thapar of trying to portray Hindu nationalism as a modern political construct squarely based on an anti-Muslim bias and which had no roots in the ancient history of the Hindus of the subcontinent.

Aroun Shourie, a former minister in the BJP government which was headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, wrote a scathing critique of historians such as Thapar in his book, Eminent Historians. He derided members of the Indian Council of Historical Research, accusing them of being Marxists. He fell just short of also labelling them anti-India.

Then there is the case of American academic and historian, James Laine, who went looking for the non-mythical aspects of the celebrated 17th century Hindu warrior Shivaji in his 2004 book Hindu King in Islamic India.

After the book was published, a group of thugs belonging to the far-right party, the Shiv Sena, stormed the library where Laine had done his research, and broke down its windows and doors and set fire to a number of books.

One of Laine’s Indian collaborators was thrashed and his face blackened. After this, people acknowledged by Laine in his book were given police guards. But the BJP government also decided to ban the book in India.

Perhaps the most notorious is the case of renowned Indian historian, Professor D.N. Jha. In 2002, he completed his eighth book, the Myth of the Holy Cow. In it he drew from various ancient historical and Hindu theological sources to establish that the cow was not always sacred in Hinduism and that ancient Hindus regularly ate beef.

To Jha the issue of cow worship and beef in India today is more political and ideological in nature than theological.

After word got out about the contents of the book, its appointed publishing house was threatened (by militant Hindu groups) and asked not to publish it. The publisher withdrew and Jha had to look for another publisher. The book was finally published but almost immediately, Jha began receiving death threats. Hindu nationalist groups demanded that Jha be arrested for heresy.

As the threats grew louder and bolder, Jha secretly left India. Even though he returned, he was unceremoniously removed from the Nalanda Mentors Group associated with the Nalanda University in Bihar.

Source: Smokers’ Corner: A matter of belief or evidence?
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, August 14th, 2016

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The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion !

The forgotten future: Sir Syed and the birth of Muslim nationalism in South Asia

Pakistan nationalism is the direct outcome of Muslim nationalism, which emerged in India in the 19th century. Its intellectual pioneer was Sir Syed Ahmad Khan.

Belonging to a family which had roots in the old Muslim nobility, Sir Syed’s prolific authorship on the Muslim condition in India (during British rule) and his activism in the field of education, helped formulate nationalist ideas in the Muslims of the region.

These ideas went on to impact and influence a plethora of Muslim intellectuals, scholars, politicians, poets, writers and journalists who then helped evolve Syed’s concept of Muslim nationalism into becoming the ideological doctrine and soul of the very idea of Pakistan.

Syed’s influence also rang loudly in the early formation of Pakistan nationalism.

However, his influence in this context began to recede from the mid-1970s when certain drastic internal, as well as external economic events; and a calamitous war with India in 1971, severely polarised the Pakistan society.

With the absence of an established form of democracy, this polarisation began to be expressed through the airing of radical alternatives such as neo-Pan-Islamism.

The Pan-Islamic alternative managed to elicit a popular response from a new generation of urban bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie. Its proliferation was also bankrolled by oil-rich Arab monarchies which had always conceived modernist Muslim nationalism as an opponent.

As a reaction, the Pakistan state changed tact and tried to retain the wavering status quo by rapidly co-opting various aspects of pan-Islamism; even to the extent of sacrificing many of the state’s original nationalist notions.

The gradual erosion of the original nationalist narrative created wide open spaces. These spaces were rapidly occupied, and then dominated by ideas which had been initially rejected by the Pakistani state and nationalist intelligentsia.

Here is from where Sir Syed’s presence begins to evaporate from the pages of textbooks and the nationalist narrative.

Muslim nationalism: A theological beginning
Muslim nationalism in South Asia did not exist till the end of Muslim rule here. The decline of the Mughal Empire, rise of British Colonialism, and the political reassertion of Hindus in India, provided the materials with which Muslim nationalism would first begin to shape itself.

Dr. Mubarak Ali has insightfully noted one very important (but often ignored) factor which helped create a sense of nationhood among sections of Muslims in India: i.e. the manner in which Urdu began to replace Persian as the preferred language of Muslims in India.

As Muslim rule receded, immigrants from Persia and Central Asia stopped travelling and settling in India because now there were little or no opportunities left for them to bag important posts in the courts of Muslim regimes.

The importance and frequency of Persian ebbed, gradually replaced by Urdu – a language which began to form in India from the 14th century CE.

Largely spoken by local Muslims (most of whom were converts); by the early 19th century, Urdu had already begun to make its way into the homes of the Muslim elite as well. This helped the local Muslims to climb their way up the social ladder and begin to fill posts and positions which were once the exclusive domain of Persian and Central Asian immigrants.

This initiated the early formation of a new Muslim grouping, mostly made-up of local Muslims who were now enjoying social mobility.

But all this was happening when the Muslim empire was rapidly receding and the British were enhancing their presence in India. This also facilitated the process which saw the Hindus reasserting themselves socially and politically after remaining subdued for hundreds of years.

With no powerful and overwhelming Muslim monarch or elite now shielding the interests of the Muslims in the region, the emerging community of local Muslims became fearful of the fact that its newly-found enhanced status might be swept aside by the expansion of British rule and Hindu reassertion.

Though many local Muslims had managed to make their way up the social ladder, the ladder now led to a place which did not have a powerful Muslim ruler. Thus, the new community was politically weak. It felt vulnerable and many of its members began accusing the later-day Mughals of squandering an empire due to their decadence.

Even some famous Muslim rulers of yore were criticised for putting too much faith in pragmatic politics and in inclusive policies, and not doing enough to use their powers to prompt wide-scale conversions.

During the heights of Muslim rule in India, the ulema had only been allowed to play a nominal role in the workings of the state. But as this rule receded, the ulema took it upon themselves to air the ambitions and fears of the new Muslim community.

The ulema insisted on explaining the decline of the Mughal Empire as a symptom of the deterioration of ‘true Islam’ in the region — due to the inclusive policies of the Mughals which strengthen the Hindus and extended patronage to Sufi saints and orders, and which, in turn, encouraged ‘alien ideas’ to seep into the beliefs and rituals of the region’s Muslims.

Such a disposition saw a number of ulema and clerics from the emerging Muslim community become drawn towards a radical puritan movement which had mushroomed 2000 miles away in Arabia (present-day Saudi Arabia) in the 18th century.

It was led by one Muhammad Al-Wahhab, a celebrant in the Nejd area of central Arabia who preached the expulsion and rejection of various practices and rituals from Islam which he claimed were distortions and heretical innovations.

A Muslim scholar from the Bengal in India, Haji Shariatullah, who was the son of an impoverished farmer, became smitten by Wahhab’s movement when he travelled to and stayed in Arabia in 1799.

On his return to India, he was extremely dismissive of the conduct of the last remnants of the Mughal Empire and conjectured that the Muslims of India had been declining as a community mainly due to the fact that they were practicing an inaccurate strain of Islam, which was adulterated by rituals borrowed from Hinduism.

Shariatullah was equally harsh on rituals he believed were a concoction of the centuries-old fusion of Sufism and Hinduism in the subcontinent.

Another figure in this regard was Syed Ahmad Barelvi who, though, an ardent follower of Sufism, believed that Sufism in India, too, was in need of reform, and that this could only be achieved by reintroducing the importance of following Sharia laws, something which one did not expect from the historically heterogeneous Sufi orders in India.

Sufism in the region had, in fact, largely opposed religious orthodoxy and was comfortable with the rituals and beliefs which had grown around it, especially among the local Muslims.

Syed Ahmad theorised that the Muslim condition was in decline because the beliefs of the common Muslims of India repulsed the idea of gaining political power through force. He suggested that this could only be achieved through the practice of the Islamic concept of holy war which was missing in the make-up of Islam in the subcontinent.

Syed Ahmad gathered a following from among common Muslims and set up a movement in the present-day Pakistan province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). The area at the time was under the rule of the Sikhs who had risen to power at the end of the Aurangzeb regime.

Barelvi had gathered over 1000 followers and most of them belonged to various Pakhtun tribes. He implored them to shun their tribal customs and strive to fight a holy war against the ‘infidels’ (Sikhs and British) in the area and help him set up a state run on Sharia laws.

After offering stiff resistance to the Sikhs, Barelvi managed to establish a strong base in the region. He began to impose laws grounded in his idea of the Sharia. The move backfired when leaders of the tribes accused him of undermining their established tribal customs.

Many of these tribes which had initially helped him fight a guerrilla war against the Sikhs, rose up against him and pushed his movement deep into the rocky hills near Charsaada. In the town of Balakot, Syed Ahmad was surrounded by the Sikh army and killed in 1831.

The idea of ‘purifying’ Islam and Muslims in India (through vigorous preaching and holy war) formulated by men like Shariatullah and Syed Ahmad were expressions of the fears haunting the local Muslims.

These fears were also triggered by the mushrooming of aggressive Hindu reformist movements and also by the arrival of Christian missionaries from Britain.

The missionaries enjoyed a good response from lower-caste Hindus and from some local Muslims as well; and men such as Shariatullah and Syed Ahmad believed that the nature of Muslim beliefs in India (especially among common Muslims) was such, that it could be easily molded by the missionaries and the Hindu reformists.

To them, only a strict adherence to Islamic laws and rituals could save the Muslim community from being completely absorbed by the changing political and social currents and events.

The movements formed by Shariatullah and Syed Ahmad made the mosques and madrassas the cornerstones of the idea of nationhood among the local Muslims.

Indeed, these movements constitute one dimension of the formation of Muslim nationalism in South Asia.

But they collapsed when the British began to assert their authority. The movements elicited a surge of passion among many Indian Muslims, but these passions put the community on a course leading to further alienation and social and political deterioration, especially after the 1857 Sepoys Mutiny against the British.

The mutiny — remembered as a War of Liberation in present-day India and Pakistan — involved an uprising within sections of Hindus and Muslims in the British Army; but most of its civilian leaders were Muslims from the local Muslim community, and remnants of the old Muslim elite.

After the bloody commotion was brought under control, the last vestiges of Mughal rule were eradicated.

According to the British — whose power grew manifold after the failure of the rebellion — it were the Muslims who had played the more active role in the rebellion. Consequently, influential British authors such as Sir William Muir began fostering the myth of the Muslim with a sword in one hand and the Qu’ran in the other.

Two factors influenced the creation of this image: the first was, of course, the nature of the movements led by Shariatullah and Syed Ahmad decades before the Mutiny; and second was the lingering imagery in the West of Muslims authored by European Christian perseveres during the Crusades (1095-1291).

Muslim nationalism: The rational turn
It is interesting to note that in their writings on India before the 1857 upheaval, the British had largely conceived India to be a racial whole.

But things in this respect began to change drastically when the British (after 1857) began to investigate the social, political and cultural dynamics of the religious differences between the Muslims and the Hindus in the region, and then utilised their findings to exert more control over both the communities.

British authors were squarely criticised by Muslim scholars in India for looking at Islamic history from a Christian point of view and presenting the legacy of Islam as something which was destructive and retrogressive.

One of the first Muslim scholars to offer a detailed rebuttal did not come from the ulema circle and neither was he a cleric. He belonged to a family which had roots in the old Muslim nobility and elite. His name was Sir Syed Ahmad Khan.

It is with him that the second (and more dominant) dimension of Muslim nationalism emerges in India.

And it is this dimension which evolved into becoming a movement that strived to carve out a separate Muslim-majority country in the subcontinent, and then further evolve to become Pakistani nationalism.

During the 1857 mutiny, Sir Syed had already established himself as a member of the scholarly Muslim gentry who had studied Sufism, mathematics, astronomy, and the works of traditional Islamic scholars.

After the Mutiny was crushed and literature, which cast a critical eye on Muslim history began to emerge, Khan put forward a detailed proposal which he hoped would not only contest the perceptions of Islam being formulated by the British, but also help the region’s Muslim community to reassess their beliefs, character and status according to the changes taking shape around it.

Khan reminded the British that Islam was inherently a progressive and modern religion which had inspired the creation of some of the world’s biggest empires, which in turn had encouraged the study of philosophy and the sciences during a period in which Europe was lurking aimlessly in the ‘Dark Ages.’

Sir Syed also asserted that the scientific and military prowess of the West was originally inspired and informed by the scholarly endeavors of medieval Muslim scientists and philosophers and that the Muslims had been left behind because this aspect of Islam stopped being exercised by them.

Interestingly, this thesis first put forward by the likes of Syed Ahmad Khan in the 19th century, still prevails within large sections of Muslims around the world today.

Sir Syed then turned his attention towards his own community. He was vehemently opposed to the militancy of men like Shariatullah and Syed Ahmad Barelvi, and he was also critical of the 1857 uprising, suggesting that such endeavors did more harm to Islam and the Muslims.

However, he refused to agree with the assessment of the British that it were the Muslims alone who instigated the 1857 mutiny. He wrote that the mutiny had been triggered by reckless British actions based on their ill-informed conceptions about Indian society.

According to noted historian, Ayesha Jalal, the concept of both Muslim and Hindu nationalism was largely the result of British social engineering which they began as a project after the 1857 Mutiny.

The project began when the British introduced the whole idea of conducting a census. A lot of emphasis was stressed upon the individual’s faith; and the results of the census were then segmented more on the bases of religion than on economic or social status.

The outcome was the rather abstract formation of communities based on faith, constructed through an overwhelmingly suggestive census, undertaken, not only to comprehend the complex nature of Indian society, but to also devise a structural way to better control it.

Sir Syed was quick to grasp this, and also the fact that the Hindu majority was in a better position to shape itself into a holistic community because of its size and better relations with the British after the 1857 Mutiny.

Sir Syed’s thesis correctly theorised that the Muslims needed to express themselves as a holistic community too, especially one which was positively responsive to the changes the British were implementing in the social, judicial and political spheres of India.

This constituted a break from the early dimensions of Muslim nationalism conjectured by the likes of Shariatullah and Syed Khan who had tried to express the idea of forming a Muslim community in India as a purely religious endeavor. The endeavor was to construct a homogenous Muslim whole in India which followed a standardised pattern of Muslim rituals and beliefs.

Nevertheless, this scheme was largely a failure because within the Muslim communities of the region were stark sectarian, sub-sectarian, class, ethnic and cultural divisions. And as was seen during Syed Ahmad Barelvi’s uprising in KP, once he began to implement his standardised ideas of the Sharia, he faced a fateful rebellion by his erstwhile supporters who accused him of trying to usurp their tribal influence and customs.

Sir Syed was conscious of these divisions and decided to address it by localising the European concept of nationalism.

So when the British began to club together economically, ethnically and culturally diverse groups into abstract Muslim, Hindu and Sikh communities, reformers from within these communities leveraged the idea of European nationalism to overcome the contradictions inherent in the whole idea of community-formation by the British.

But this was easier said than done. Nationalism was a modern European idea which required a particular way of understanding history, society and politics for a people to come together as a nation.

This idea was absent in India before the arrival of the British. As Muslim rule began to ebb, men such as Shariatullah and Syed Khan attempted to club the Muslims of India as a community which shared theological commonalities with Muslim communities elsewhere in the world, and especially those present in Arabia.

During the last days of Muslim rule, clerics in Indian mosques had begun to replace the names of Mughal kings in their sermons (khutba) with those of the rulers of the Ottoman Empire, as if to suggest that the interests of the Muslims of India were inherently rooted outside India.

Indeed, the ulema had begun to conceive the Muslims of India as a unified whole, but this whole was not explained as a nation in the modern context, but as part of a larger Muslim ummah.

Sir Syed saw a problem in this approach. He decried that such an approach went against the changing tides of history.

He was perturbed by three main attitudinal negatives which he believed had crept into the psyche of the Muslims and were stemming their intellectual growth, and, consequently, causing their economic and political decline.

They were: decadence; worship of the past; and dogma.

Khan wrote that after reaching the heights of imperial power, Muslims had become decadent and lazy. When this led to them losing political power, they became overtly nostalgic about past glories which, in turn, solidified their inferiority complex (prompted by their current apathetical state in the face of the rise of the West). This caused a hardening of views in them against modernity and change and the emergence of a dogmatic attitude.

To Syed, the Muslims of India stood still, unmoving, and, in fact, refusing to move because they believed a great conspiracy had been hatched against them. He suggested that the Muslims (of India) had lost political power because ‘they had lost their ability to rule.’

He castigated the ulema for forcing the Muslims to reject science (because it was ‘Western’); he warned that such a view towards the sciences will keep Muslims buried under the weight of superstition on the one hand, and dogma on the other.

When the ulema responded by accusing him of creating divisions in a community which they were trying to unite, he wrote that since he was a reformist, his job was not to unite but to jolt members of his community by questioning established (but corrosive) social, intellectual and political norms.

He asked the ulema: The Greeks learned from the Egyptians; the Muslims from the Greeks; the Europeans from the Muslims … so what calamity will befall the Muslims if they learned from the British?

But, of course, he was using an evolutionary model of history to understand how knowledge flows between civilizations; whereas to most of his orthodox critics, history was a set of traditions passed on by one Muslim scholar to another and disseminated among the masses by the ulema and the clerics.

Syed’s initial work was largely analytical and pedagogic. He did not have the kind of platform which his detractors had (i.e. the mosques and madrassas). But this did not seem to worry him. He believed that the changing reality (under the British) will impact the Muslims in such a manner that many of them would eventually come to understand his point of view.

He wanted them to overcome their cultural and theological inertias and embrace what was on offer: Modern education.

There was to be no meeting point between the ulema and him, simply because both where viewing the Muslim condition in India from different lenses.

However, Syed did try to meet them by dissecting their theological critiques of modernity. He wrote that a man’s spiritual and moral life cannot improve without the flourishing of his material life.

Writing in a journal which he launched in 1870, he reminded his critics that not only were Muslims once enthusiastic patrons of science (between the 9th and 13th centuries), but the Qu’ran too, urged its readers to ‘research the universe’ which was one of God’s greatest creations.

To further his argument that Islam was inherently a progressive religion, and, in essence, timeless (in the sense that it was easily adaptable to ever-changing zeitgeists), Khan authored a meticulously researched and detailed commentary on the Qu’ran.

Tafslr Qu’ran was published in 1880 and for its time, was a rather original and even bold interpretation of Islam’s holiest book because it tried to construe the book’s contents in the light of the 19th century.

Khan insisted that decrees passed by ancient ulema were time-bound and could not be imposed in a much-changed scenario of what was taking place here and now. He wrote that the Muslims were in need of a ‘new theology of Islam’ which was rational and rejected all doctrinal notions that were in disagreement with common sense, reason and with the essence of the Qu’ran.

He wrote that the ‘codes of belief’ and spirituality were the main concerns of religion and that cultural habits (pertaining to eating, dressing, etc.) are mundane matters for which Islam provides only moral guidance because they change with time and place.

He believed that if faith is not practiced through reason and wisdom, it can never be followed with any real conviction.

He wrote that ancient scholars of Islam were not infallible. He insisted that the ulema were devising their world view and that of Islam by uncritically borrowing from the thoughts of ancient ulema.

This, to him, had made them dogmatic in their thinking and hostile towards even the most positive aspects of the changes taking shape around them.

Enter Afghani
Another modernist tendency which had been introduced among the Muslims of India in the 19th century was pan-Islamism. One of its earliest advocates was Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani — a bright young Afghan ideologist who arrived in India in 1855.

Afghani passionately supported the 1857 Mutiny and was exasperated when it failed. Unlike the orthodox ulema, Afghani did not see any good in turning inwards and radically rejecting the modernity associated with British rule.

He acknowledged the supremacy of ‘Western education’ but emphasised that Muslims should embrace it to improve their lot and then turn the tables against Western imperialism by overthrowing it and establishing a global Islamic caliphate.

Unlike the Muslim modernism pioneered by the likes of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Afghani, and, subsequently, pan-Islamism, viewed Western modernity (especially in the field of education), as an elixir to regenerate the Muslims — not as a way to help them excel and find a place within colonial settings, but to fully understand and then eradicate colonialism.

Sir Syed’s Muslim modernism, however, was largely interested in the intellectual, social and political fate of the Muslim community of India. So he thought that Afghani’s idea of radically confronting the British would produce the same demoralising results (for the Muslims) as did the failure of the 1857 Mutiny.

Afghani censured Sir Syed for harming the global Muslim cause by speaking only about India’s Muslims, as if they were separate from the Muslim communities elsewhere.

Afghani was vocal in his denunciations of the orthodox ulema who were rejecting modern education; however, quite like the ulema, Afghani too, saw the Muslims as a global community (ummah).

Pan-Islamism was thus inherently anti-nationalist.

Unlike later-day pan-Islamists, Afghani was rather progressive and modernistic in his thinking. More than seeing Islam as a theistic route to a political revolution, he, instead, saw it as a slogan to rally Muslims around the world against European imperialism.

The pan-Islamist thought which he pioneered valued the importance of reforming the Muslim mindset through modern intellectual means, and then using the reformed as a weapons against the political supremacy of Western colonialism. But in the next century, only the edifice of what he first conceived would remain in the evolving realms of pan-Islamism.

For example, 20th century pan-Islamist notions were not so much inspired by Afghani, as much as they were by how the Islamic orthodoxy began to perceive pan-Islamism i.e. as an ideology which attempts to erect a global caliphate, not through a faith strengthened by progressive reform, but by a largely mythical understanding of the faith’s bygone militaristic and moralistic splendour.

Most probably Sir Syed opposed the idea of pan-Islamism because he understood that it was bound to evolve in this manner?

Syed’s triumph
In 1879 one of Sir Syed’s staunchest supporters, the poet and intellectual, Altaf Hussain Hali, wrote a long poem which passionately forwarded Syed’s ideas of reform and modernity. But the most protuberant aspect of the poem was when Hali declared the Muslims of India as a separate cultural entity, distinct from other communities in India, especially compared to the Hindu majority.

But Hali explained that this distinction was not based on any hostility towards the non Muslims of the region; but on the notion (which Hali believed was a fact) that the Muslims of India were descendants of foreigners who came and settled here during Muslim rule.

By the late 19th century, many local Muslims had begun to claim foreign ancestry (Persian, Central Asian and Arabian) mainly because with the erosion of Muslim rule in India, Muslim empires still existed elsewhere in the Middle East. The claim of having foreign ancestry was also a way to express the separateness of India’s Muslims.

Another aspect in this context was the rise of the Urdu language among the Muslims. Though having (and claiming to have) Persian, Central Asian and Arabic ancestry was a proud attribute to flaunt; Urdu, which had been the language of ‘lower Muslims’ of (North) India, ascended and began to rapidly develop into a complex literary language.

The British didn’t have a problem with this. Because since Persian had been the language of the court during Muslim rule, its rollback symbolised the retreat of the memory and influence of Muslim rule in India.

In 1837, the British replaced Persian with Urdu (in the northern regions of India) as one of the officially recognised vernacular languages of India. But in the 1860s, Urdu became a symbol of Muslim separatism not through the efforts of the Muslims, but, ironically, due to the way some Hindus reacted to Urdu becoming an official language.

The resultant controversy triggered by Hindu reservations helped establish Urdu as an additional factor which separated the Muslims from the Hindus.

Syed Ahmad Khan had managed to attract the support and admiration of a growing number of young intellectuals, journalists, authors and poets. But he was the target of some vicious polemical attacks as well.

The conservative ulema were extremely harsh in their criticism and one of them even went on to accuse him of being an apostate. They blamed him for trying to tear the Muslims away from the unchangeable tenants of their religion, and for promoting ‘Angraziat’ (Western ethics and customs) among the believers.

Syed also received criticism from the supporters of Afghani’s pan-Islamism. Afghani himself admonished Khan for not only undermining the idea of global Muslim unity (by alluding to Muslim nationalism in the context of India’s Muslims only); but he also censured him for creating divisions between India’s Muslims and Hindus.

Afghani was of the view that Hindu-Muslim unity was vital in India to challenge British rule in the region.

Despite the attacks — which mostly came his way through statements, editorials and articles in the plethora of Urdu newspapers which began to come up after the proliferation of the printing press in India – it were his ideas which managed to dominate the most prominent dimensions of Muslim nationalism in India.

According to Ayesha Jalal, Sir Syed’s strategic and pragmatic alignment with the British helped his ideas to make vital in-roads in a more organised and freer manner.

His religious detractors remained stationed in their mosques and madrassahs. And though their criticism of his ideas was intense, it mostly appeared in rhetorical articles in newspapers.

Consequently, most of his religious opponents could not find a place in the school that he set up in Aligarh.

This school evolved into becoming a college and then an institution which began to produce a particular Muslim elite and urban bourgeoisie who would go on to dominate Muslim nationalist thought in India and decide what course it would take.

Source: Sir Syed and the birth of Muslim nationalism
Published in Dawn, August 18, 2016.

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